A dozen stories (1989—99) that show a slightly darker tinge than Roberts’s novels (The Bluest Blood, 1998, etc.) about Philadelphia schoolteacher Amanda Pepper (Roberts obligingly includes two Pepper stories, one of them a short-short whose heroine is technically anonymous, for purposes of comparison). To be sure, Roberts treats her favorite subject here—the psychopathology of middle-aged matronhood—with a light touch in the routine “The Shrine of Eleanor” and “Love Is a Many Splintered Thing,” giving the male of the species his due in the otherwise interchangeable “Goodbye, Sue Ellen.” And when she ventures into deeper waters, the results are sometimes overwrought (“Hog Heaven”), strained (“Heart Break”), or unbelievable (“Clear Sailing”). Roberts’s best stories nail the darker side of her inimitably frustrated postmenopausal singles and couples with a concept as witty as her mad-housewife interior monologies. “Where’s the Harm in That?” sets a sheltered heroine loose among the personal ads. “What’s a Woman to Do?” pits a “standard issue Little Old Lady” against a tirelessly barking dog. Best of all, “After Happily Ever” follows Cinderella and her prince through the marriage that was supposed to end their story. Just a bit tarter than Pepper.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-7862-2036-8
Page Count: 250
Publisher: Five Star/Gale Cengage
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An undisciplined but powerfully lacerating story, by an author who knows every block of the neighborhood and every hair on...
After five adventures for Boston shamus Patrick Kenzie and his off-again lover Angela Gennaro (Prayers for Rain, 1999, etc.), Lehane tries his hand at a crossover novel that’s as dark as any of Patrick’s cases.
Even the 1975 prologue is bleak. Sean Devine and Jimmy Marcus are playing, or fighting, outside Sean’s parents’ house in the Point neighborhood of East Buckingham when a car pulls up, one of the two men inside flashes a badge, and Sean and Jimmy’s friend Dave Boyle gets bundled inside, allegedly to be driven home to his mother for a scolding but actually to get kidnapped. Though Dave escapes after a few days, he never really outlives his ordeal, and 25 years later it’s Jimmy’s turn to join him in hell when his daughter Katie is shot and beaten to death in the wilds of Pen Park, and State Trooper Sean, just returned from suspension, gets assigned to the case. Sean knows that both Dave and Jimmy have been in more than their share of trouble in the past. And he’s got an especially close eye on Jimmy, whose marriage brought him close to the aptly named Savage family and who’s done hard time for robbery. It would be just like Jimmy, Sean knows, to ignore his friend’s official efforts and go after the killer himself. But Sean would be a lot more worried if he knew what Dave’s wife Celeste knows: that hours after catching sight of Katie in the last bar she visited on the night of her death, Dave staggered home covered with somebody else’s blood. Burrowing deep into his three sorry heroes and the hundred ties that bind them unbearably close, Lehane weaves such a spellbinding tale that it’s easy to overlook the ramshackle mystery behind it all.
An undisciplined but powerfully lacerating story, by an author who knows every block of the neighborhood and every hair on his characters’ heads.Pub Date: Jan. 30, 2001
ISBN: 0-688-16316-5
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2000
This ran in the S.E.P. and resulted in more demands for the story in book form than ever recorded. Well, here it is and it is a honey. Imagine ten people, not knowing each other, not knowing why they were invited on a certain island house-party, not knowing their hosts. Then imagine them dead, one by one, until none remained alive, nor any clue to the murderer. Grand suspense, a unique trick, expertly handled.
Pub Date: Feb. 21, 1939
ISBN: 0062073478
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Dodd, Mead
Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1939
SEEN & HEARD
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