by Gordon Dahlquist ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 5, 2006
Way, way over the top.
A bloated, wildly fanciful Edgar Allan Poe–esque tale, seemingly set in Victorian London, follows a jilted young woman’s plucky resolve to get to the bottom of her fiancé’s mysterious disappearance.
Miss Celestial Temple, a young woman of respectable means, receives an incomprehensible letter at her hotel from her intended, Roger Bascombe, abruptly ending their engagement—and she decides to follow him. It proves quite an adventure, taking Miss Temple on a curious train ride and depositing her in a sumptuous house equipped with a theater in which she witnesses strangely erotic experiments on women, while Bascombe and others watch from the gallery. Giving her name as Isobel Hastings, she is coerced into a masked ball and nearly raped trying to escape before managing to make her way back to the city. Meanwhile, a certain shady Cardinal Chang, so-called because of his red topcoat and Asian appearance, is hired to knock off Colonel Arthur Trapping, commander of the 4th Dragoons, who is already dead and disfigured by the time Chang gets to him. Numerous characters become absorbed in Trapping’s murder, such as Doctor Abelard Svenson, who acts as the ward of a young, profligate, weak-willed prince, Karl-Horst van Maasmarck, engaged to be married, for political reasons, to Lord Vandaariff’s daughter, Lydia. The prince vanishes inexplicably, and the doctor finds in his rooms two glass cards, the size of calling cards, through which several notable characters, namely Bascombe, can be viewed in revealing and intimate moving images. The plot travels perilously tortuous paths, as together Doctor Svenson, Miss Temple and Chang track missing characters whose names keep changing to confound the defenseless reader. They are lured back to the theater, where a cabal of dangerous men possesses glass books into which people drain their minds.
Way, way over the top.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2006
ISBN: 0-385-34035-4
Page Count: 768
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2006
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by Caitlin Mullen ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 3, 2020
A lyrical, incisive, and haunting debut.
In Atlantic City, the bodies of several women wait to be discovered and a young psychic begins having visions of terrible violence.
They are known only as Janes 1 through 6, the women who have been strangled and left in the marsh behind the seedy Sunset Motel. They wait for someone to miss them, to find them. That someone might be Clara, a teenage dropout who works the Atlantic City strip as a psychic and occasionally has visions. She can tell there's something dangerous at work, but she has other problems. To pay the rent, she begins selling her company, and then her body, to older men. One day she meets Lily, another young woman who'd escaped the depressing decay of Atlantic City for New York only to be betrayed by a man. She’s come back to AC because there’s nowhere else to go, and she spends her time working a dead-end job and drinking herself into oblivion. Together, Clara and Lily may be able to figure out the truth—but they will each lose something along the way. Mullen’s style is subtle, flowing; she switches the narrative voice with each chapter, giving us Clara and Lily but also each of the victims. At the heart of the novel lies the bitter observation that “Women get humiliated every day, in small stupid ways and in huge, disastrous ones.” Mullen writes about all the moments that women compromise themselves in the face of male desire and male power and how they learn to use sex as commerce because “men are always promised this, no matter who they are.” The other major character in the novel is Atlantic City itself: fading; falling to ruin; promising an old sort of glamour that no longer exists; swindling sad, lonely people out of their money. This backdrop is unexpected and well rendered.
A lyrical, incisive, and haunting debut.Pub Date: March 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-2748-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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by Lisa Jewell ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 24, 2018
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.
Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.
Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s (I Found You, 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5464-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
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