by Gin Mackey ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 23, 2016
Goes beyond a cozy, small-town mystery to consider some immense and difficult matters.
A widow’s efforts to become a home-funeral guide entangle her in a murder case in this novel.
As Abby Tiernan’s husband, Tom, lies dying of cancer, he requests a home funeral rather than being embalmed in a mortuary and interred in an expensive casket. Washing and preparing a body at home, with burial in a simple wooden box, used to be the common practice, but nowadays few even know that it’s legal. In today’s culture, says a home-funeral guide Abby consults, “we want to disappear our dead.” After Tom’s death, Abby spirals downward, but starts pulling herself together—especially when community members in Falls Harbor, Maine, start asking for her help in conducting their own home funerals. She’s at first reluctant, but Abby sees a need and eventually starts offering her services as a home-funeral guide to people like Mark Jackson, whose wife, Susan, is dying. But not everyone appreciates her efforts, such as a local funeral home director. Attempts are made to scare her off; worse, Abby falls under suspicion after Susan dies—and readers already know from the prologue that it’s murder. Questions swirling, Abby decides to investigate, while also trying to salvage a relationship with her daughter, Delia, and to get closer to Brad Rainey, a Falls Harbor detective and widower. Buried secrets come to light, and Abby finds a way to move on while helping others. Mackey (Suddenly Spying, 2016, etc.) offers an unusual but successful combination of murder mystery, romance after widowhood, and a mother-daughter story with an informative and thoughtful discussion on attitudes and practices toward the dying and funerals. The traditional funeral-home director gets to say his piece here as well, giving the question a fair outing. The author also discusses the ethical issues involved with assisted suicide versus euthanasia, again presenting points of view equitably. These issues link well with the plot, and rarely become didactic. The mother-daughter dilemma is somewhat melodramatic and Abby’s endless what-if questions can become tiresome, but these are minor concerns.
Goes beyond a cozy, small-town mystery to consider some immense and difficult matters.Pub Date: Dec. 23, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-9972080-2-3
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Pink Granite Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 29, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2001
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
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 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
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by Graham Swift ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 5, 1996
Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.
Pub Date: April 5, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-41224-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
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