A forced effort to leverage interest around the legendary Chelsea Hotel, this novel is a miss.
Perennial Broadway understudy Hazel Ripley and center-stage bombshell Maxine Mead formed a close bond as performers touring with the USO during World War ll. Now that they’ve been home for five years, can their friendship survive the McCarthy-era witch hunt for Communists in show business?
Davis (The Masterpiece, 2018, etc.) has built her brand crafting historical fiction set at New York landmarks like the Barbizon Hotel, the Dakota apartment building, and Grand Central Terminal. Now readers are taken behind the doors of the storied Chelsea Hotel, a creative oasis for artists and freethinkers, as Hazel and Maxine try to navigate the Broadway theater scene. While Hazel has never enjoyed success onstage, she discovers a talent for playwriting and directing. Her career is off to a promising start, especially since bestie Maxine has agreed to use her star power as a box office draw for Hazel’s show. Their drama unfolds offstage when both women are named on a list of Communist sympathizers and must testify about suspected anti-American activities. With a high-stakes storyline that should be tension-filled, the novel unfortunately features prose that is expository and flat. Maxine’s diary confessionals fail to give any insight into her inner life and seem only to serve as information downloads. Even revelations that should shock evoke a tepid response, probably because the buildup has been so noncompelling. Thankfully, Hazel’s relationships—with everyone from her mother to a private investigator working in tandem with the FBI—are more engaging and complex. Notably absent from the cast list, though, is the Chelsea Hotel itself. In Davis’ previous novels, the setting plays an integral role in the storyline. Here, though, the sparse descriptions of the site seem to be almost an afterthought. Hazel and Maxine could have been living at a Holiday Inn and it would have had no effect on the telling.
A forced effort to leverage interest around the legendary Chelsea Hotel, this novel is a miss.Pub Date: July 30, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5247-4458-8
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: April 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Readers who’ve always wanted to see Spenser in Tinseltown can cross that off their bucket lists.
Spenser goes to Hollywood.
In the two years since she’s moved from Cambridge to Los Angeles in pursuit of stardom, Gabrielle Leggett has been a dog walker, a personal assistant, a model, an actress, a media influencer, and now, for the past two weeks, a missing person. The LAPD knows about Gabby’s disappearance, but her mother, dissatisfied with their efforts, sends Spenser (Robert B. Parker’s Old Black Magic, 2018, etc.) out to the Left Coast to do the job right. Predictably, Gabby’s agent and former romantic partner, Eric Collinson, doesn’t want to talk to him. Neither does Jeffrey Bloom, the acting coach who thought Gabby had just dropped out of his class, or Jimmy Yamashiro, the married studio CEO who took Collinson’s place. And the only thing publicist Nancy Sharp, Gabby’s ex-boss, wants to talk about is how much fun she and Spenser could have if he’d only lighten up. Eventually Spenser works his contacts to get an audience with Yamashiro, but the results are less than impressive. He must be making an impression, though, because five Armenian thugs ambush him and shoot his West Coast associate, Zebulun Sixkill, in the arm, disabling him and requiring Spenser to look for another sidekick. Eventually he gets a lead that connects Gabby to Joseph Haldorn, aka Phaethon, the founder of HELIOS, a hush-hush organization that promises self-actualization and conducts itself suspiciously like a cult. But instead of thickening, the mystery surrounding Gabby just gets more violent and diffuse. Surprisingly, Atkins gets the hardest parts right—his hero/narrator now sounds indistinguishable from Robert B. Parker’s—but bogs down in the plotting, the area in which he presumably had the freest hand. As for the cod-out-of-water milieu, it evokes not so much particular SoCal locations as dozens of earlier SoCal whodunits.
Readers who’ve always wanted to see Spenser in Tinseltown can cross that off their bucket lists.Pub Date: Nov. 19, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-53682-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
More perhaps than any of Connelly’s much-honored other titles, this one reveals why his procedurals are the most soulful in...
The 30th novel by the creator of Harry Bosch (The Wrong Side of Goodbye, 2016, etc.) and the Lincoln Lawyer (The Gods of Guilt, 2013, etc.) introduces an LAPD detective fighting doggedly for justice for herself and a wide array of victims.
Ever since her partner, Detective Ken Chastain, failed to back up her sexual harassment claim against Lt. Robert Olivas, her supervisor at the Robbery Homicide Division, Renée Ballard has been banished to the midnight shift—the late show. She’s kept her chin down and worked her cases, most of which are routinely passed on to the day shifts, without complaints or recriminations. But that all ends the night she and Detective John Jenkins, the partner who’s running on empty, are called to The Dancers, a nightclub where five people have been shot dead. Three of them—a bookie, a drug dealer, and a rumored mob enforcer—are no great loss, but Ballard can’t forget Cynthia Haddel, the young woman serving drinks while she waited for her acting career to take off. The case naturally falls to Olivas, who humiliatingly shunts Ballard aside. But she persists in following leads during her time off even though she’d already caught another case earlier the same night, the brutal assault on Ramona Ramone, ne Ramón Gutierrez, a trans hooker beaten nearly to death who mumbles something about “the upside-down house” before lapsing into a coma. Despite, or because of, the flak she gets from across the LAPD, Ballard soldiers on, horrified but energized when Chastain is gunned down only a few hours after she tells him off for the way he let her down two years ago. She’ll run into layers of interference, get kidnapped herself, expose a leak in the department, kill a man, and find some wholly unexpected allies before she claps the cuffs on the killer in a richly satisfying conclusion.
More perhaps than any of Connelly’s much-honored other titles, this one reveals why his procedurals are the most soulful in the business: because he finds the soul in the smallest details, faithfully executed.Pub Date: July 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-316-22598-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: June 19, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
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