Biographies are as telling as clues in this smartly written debut mystery set in California wine country.
Ghostwriter Charlie Teller ought to recognize a fall from grace when he sees one. Celebrities, artists and athletes who’d flown high only to crash and burn had been Charlie’s bread-and-butter, at least until personal scandal abruptly punctuated his own career and turned his marriage into a dangling modifier. But the murder of Santa Rosa restaurateur and health-club owner Paul Barkley requires deep background sleuthing, and Charlie has the chops for the job. He found the body, after all. Plus there’s that memory stick Paul passed to Charlie on the night of the murder, containing a mysterious spreadsheet, and it was Paul who introduced Charlie to Rajiv Patel, a construction mogul in search of a memoirist, on whose estate Teller now lives and writes. Local detective Eddie Mahler suspects Charlie has unauthorized dirt on Paul, and he’s not far off. Complicating the picture is Paul’s fiancée Page, a fitness instructor who may have private exercise plans for Charlie, and Kenny McDonald, reclusive ex–front man for a famed ’60s band and the local poster boy for lawyers, guns and money. When Charlie teams with a neo-bohemian masseuse from Paul’s health club and her former–Special Forces beau for some legwork, there will be blood. The brisk action gets interrupted by a series of digressions in which Charlie reflects on his past books. These are strong stories, with thoughtful accounts of the ghostwriter’s craft and the hazards of success and failure, but at times they feel too deep for this otherwise well-coiled suspense, especially when Teller’s richly drawn celebrity subjects threaten to eclipse the book’s main cast. Nonetheless, Weisel writes with aplomb and has solid grasp of the genre. A keen sense of redemption pervades, along with elegant echoes of Chandler and MacDonald. A sophisticated, literary whodunit that proves lives are harder to solve than crimes.
Pub Date: Oct. 24, 2011
ISBN: 978-1457506376
Page Count: 278
Publisher: Dog Ear Publishing
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
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Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
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Kin “[find] each other’s lives inscrutable” in this rich, sharp story about the way identity is formed.
27
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Inseparable identical twin sisters ditch home together, and then one decides to vanish.
The talented Bennett fuels her fiction with secrets—first in her lauded debut, The Mothers (2016), and now in the assured and magnetic story of the Vignes sisters, light-skinned women parked on opposite sides of the color line. Desiree, the “fidgety twin,” and Stella, “a smart, careful girl,” make their break from stultifying rural Mallard, Louisiana, becoming 16-year-old runaways in 1954 New Orleans. The novel opens 14 years later as Desiree, fleeing a violent marriage in D.C., returns home with a different relative: her 8-year-old daughter, Jude. The gossips are agog: “In Mallard, nobody married dark....Marrying a dark man and dragging his blueblack child all over town was one step too far.” Desiree's decision seals Jude’s misery in this “colorstruck” place and propels a new generation of flight: Jude escapes on a track scholarship to UCLA. Tending bar as a side job in Beverly Hills, she catches a glimpse of her mother’s doppelgänger. Stella, ensconced in White society, is shedding her fur coat. Jude, so Black that strangers routinely stare, is unrecognizable to her aunt. All this is expertly paced, unfurling before the book is half finished; a reader can guess what is coming. Bennett is deeply engaged in the unknowability of other people and the scourge of colorism. The scene in which Stella adopts her White persona is a tour de force of doubling and confusion. It calls up Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, the book's 50-year-old antecedent. Bennett's novel plays with its characters' nagging feelings of being incomplete—for the twins without each other; for Jude’s boyfriend, Reese, who is trans and seeks surgery; for their friend Barry, who performs in drag as Bianca. Bennett keeps all these plot threads thrumming and her social commentary crisp. In the second half, Jude spars with her cousin Kennedy, Stella's daughter, a spoiled actress.
Kin “[find] each other’s lives inscrutable” in this rich, sharp story about the way identity is formed.Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-525-53629-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: March 15, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
Categories: LITERARY FICTION | GENERAL FICTION
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