Another tale of incisive sleuths that’s short but thoroughly enjoyable.
In Chen’s (An Intangible Affair, 2017, etc.) latest series installment, Bostonian amateur detective and biologist Ann Lee sets out to prove the innocence of a friend accused of murder.
Ann knows that potential in-laws can be burdensome; after all, her former boyfriend’s stepmother turned out to be a killer in a previous book in this series. So she understands when her friend Betty Foreman is stressed by her fiance Peter Shi’s mom, Emily. Betty thinks that the overprotective parent has made her son a “mama’s boy”; indeed, Peter takes his mother’s side whenever she and Betty have an argument. It’s not surprising that Betty is a suspect after Emily’s body is discovered at the bottom of a flight of stairs. The dying woman’s 911 call, in which she named Betty as her murderer, only solidifies the police’s case. But Ann believes Betty’s claim of innocence; she says that she argued with Emily on the day in question but left when the old woman threw a vase at her. With Betty’s trial imminent, Ann decides to try to debunk the damning evidence against her. Luckily, she has help from her best friend and partner at their detective agency, Fang Chen, who’s a chemist as well. The investigation involves interviewing Emily’s neighbor, who called 911 regarding the women’s loud squabble, and talking to Emily’s sister in Hong Kong. As in preceding novels in this series, Chen delivers a brisk story with a simple but tight mystery that’s often heavy on dialogue. Along the way, the author has Ann meticulously develop a theory to fit the evidence—that is, one in which Betty isn’t guilty of murder. Romantic relationships also complicate matters, as Ann is currently dating Betty’s older brother, Seth Foreman. Ann’s investigation, along with Fang Chen’s input, has an organic feel: Every conjecture has a clear source, and nothing that she deduces feels like a wild guess. Still, the ending, while plausible, gets a bit convoluted as Ann juggles multiple theories of the crime.
Another tale of incisive sleuths that’s short but thoroughly enjoyable.Pub Date: June 15, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-71863-069-7
Page Count: 220
Publisher: Back Bay Investigation
Review Posted Online: June 11, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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