Kooky alliances chase a zillion-dollar payday.
When Saburo Taihotsu finally expires at 91, he leaves behind a mercantile empire that includes not only cars, computers, cameras, clothing, household goods and doodads deemed necessities by a greedy world, but a reputation as the last holdout of World War II, a man who bypassed Pearl Harbor and crash-landed his A6M2 Mitsubishi Zero on Kauai, where he spent the war outwitting searchers and dabbling in pesky raids that earned him the nickname the Mongoose. Although rumor has it he either took his fortune to heaven or burned it all in his factories’ ovens, a clue to its whereabouts is slipped under the door of Rob Weather, who may be the grandson he never met (from his years spent canoodling on Kauai) as well as the great-grandson of Carla Chance’s second cousin. Carla, the longtime companion of fourth-rate standup comic Buster Hightower (Disappeared, 2010, etc.), thinks Rob would be a good catch for her mathematician pal Sarah. Before you can gasp “MacGuffin,” the foursome is trying to decipher a shaky bit of calligraphy that’s basically 26 digits. Some of these digits wind up being televised by the tabloid news show Exclusive!, which offers megabucks to anyone who can decipher the clue. Also on the hunt for Taihotsu’s fortune are an orthodontist, his wife and their creditors, a trio of Vegas goons demanding the principal plus their vig. Everyone concerned twists those numbers forward, backward and edgewise while hatching new romances and strategies as to who will profit and who will be cut off, maybe even cut up. They all wind up at the Tikal ruins, where a critter lopes into the jungle with a bit of the plot. Grandiloquently goofy, with madcap pacing, dead-on riffs on cultural inanities and a plethora of lawyer puns. Come on, aren’t you ready for a good laugh?
Pub Date: Aug. 17, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4328-2534-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Five Star/Gale Cengage
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2011
A quick, fun read. Rowling delivers a set of characters every bit as durable as her Potter people and a story that, though...
Murderous muggles are up to no good, and it’s up to a seemingly unlikely hero to set things right.
The big news surrounding this pleasing procedural is that Galbraith, reputed former military policeman and security expert, is none other than J.K. Rowling, who presumably has no experience on the Afghan front or at Scotland Yard. Why the pseudonymous subterfuge? We may never know. What’s clear, and what matters, is that Galbraith/Rowling’s yarn is an expertly written exercise in both crime and social criticism of a piece with Rowling’s grown-up novel The Casual Vacancy (2012), even if her hero, private detective Cormoran Strike, bears a name that wouldn’t be out of place in her Harry Potter series. Strike is a hard-drinking, hard-bitten, lonely mess of a man, for reasons that Rowling reveals bit by bit, carefully revealing the secrets he keeps about his parentage, his time in battle and his bad luck. Strike is no Sherlock Holmes, but he’s a dogged pursuer of The Truth, in this instance the identity of the person who may or may not have relieved a supermodel of her existence most unpleasantly: “Her head had bled a little into the snow. The face was crushed and swollen, one eye reduced to a pucker, the other showing as a sliver of dull white between distended lids.” It’s an icky image, but no ickier than Rowling’s roundup of sinister, self-serving, sycophantic characters who inhabit the world of high fashion, among the most suspicious of them a fellow who’s—well, changed his name to pull something over on his audience (“It’s a long fucking way from Hackney, I can tell you...”). Helping Strike along as he turns over stones in the yards of the rich and famous is the eminently helpful Robin Ellacott, newcomer to London and determined to do better than work as a mere temp, which is what lands her at Strike’s door. The trope of rumpled detective and resourceful girl Friday is an old one, of course, but Rowling dusts it off and makes it new even as she turns London into a setting for her tale of mayhem as memorable as what Dashiell Hammett did with San Francisco in The Maltese Falcon.
A quick, fun read. Rowling delivers a set of characters every bit as durable as her Potter people and a story that, though no more complex than an Inspector Lewis episode, works well on every level.Pub Date: April 30, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-316-20684-6
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Mulholland Books/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2013
Fans who still mourn the passing of Agatha Christie, the model who’s evoked here in dozens of telltale details, will welcome...
A preternaturally brainy novel within a novel that’s both a pastiche and a deconstruction of golden-age whodunits.
Magpie Murders, bestselling author Alan Conway’s ninth novel about Greek/German detective Atticus Pünd, kicks off with the funeral of Mary Elizabeth Blakiston, devoted housekeeper to Sir Magnus Pye, who’s been found at the bottom of a steep staircase she’d been vacuuming in Pye Hall, whose every external door was locked from the inside. Her demise has all the signs of an accident until Sir Magnus himself follows her in death, beheaded with a sword customarily displayed with a full suit of armor in Pye Hall. Conway's editor, Susan Ryeland, does her methodical best to figure out which of many guilty secrets Conway has provided the suspects in Saxby-on-Avon—Rev. Robin Osborne and his wife, Henrietta; Mary’s son, Robert, and his fiancee, Joy Sanderling; Joy’s boss, surgeon Emilia Redwing, and her elderly father; antiques dealers Johnny and Gemma Whitehead; Magnus’ twin sister, Clarissa; and Lady Frances Pye and her inevitable lover, investor Jack Dartford—is most likely to conceal a killer, but she’s still undecided when she comes to the end of the manuscript and realizes the last chapter is missing. Since Conway in inconveniently unavailable, Susan, in the second half of the book, attempts to solve the case herself, questioning Conway’s own associates—his sister, Claire; his ex-wife, Melissa; his ex-lover, James Taylor; his neighbor, hedge fund manager John White—and slowly comes to the realization that Conway has cast virtually all of them as fictional avatars in Magpie Murders and that the novel, and indeed Conway’s entire fictional oeuvre, is filled with a mind-boggling variety of games whose solutions cast new light on murders fictional and nonfictional.
Fans who still mourn the passing of Agatha Christie, the model who’s evoked here in dozens of telltale details, will welcome this wildly inventive homage/update/commentary as the most fiendishly clever puzzle—make that two puzzles—of the year.Pub Date: June 6, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-06-264522-7
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 6, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2017
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