A technically accomplished but largely downbeat tale of miserable people learning life lessons late.
A wife and mother goes missing, and a family is forced to reassess both the past and the future.
Call it Gone Woman. The morning after a bad argument with her husband, Lovell, a climate scientist, 39-year-old Hannah Hall disappears on her way to work. When some of her possessions and then pieces of bone are found on a South Boston beach, it gets progressively harder for Lovell and their two children, 15-year-old Janine and 8-year-old Ethan, to fend off their fears for her safety. These are the scant plot points of Best American Short Stories series editor Pitlor’s second novel (The Birthdays, 2006), and they're augmented by flashbacks, character studies, and descriptions of the family's struggles to cope with Hannah's disappearance and the media's interest in it. Originally from a wealthy Martha’s Vineyard family, Hannah emerges as unfulfilled and naïve, still yearning at some romantic fantasy level for Doug, the handsome boy to whom she was originally engaged before he revealed his faithlessness. Lovell, from a semirural background in Maine, now wholly immersed in his work, couldn’t believe his luck when Hannah accepted his proposal—“She was light years out of his league”—but that was before the marriage turned sexless and sour. A pall of unhappiness hangs over the story as the weaknesses of the marriage, Hannah’s equivocal feelings, and the doomed nature of events (gradually revealed in chapters narrated from Hannah’s point of view on that fateful day) are examined. While Lovell is a gloomy central character and Janine is insolent and disdainful in her teenage distress, Pitlor lays a closing gleam of compassion over them all.
A technically accomplished but largely downbeat tale of miserable people learning life lessons late.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-61620-368-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Why is Sandford's new Kidd-series novel, The Empress File (p. 120; written under his real name of John Camp), so frazzled? Maybe because this increasingly popular author is putting his finest energies into his best-selling Lucas Davenport series (Rules of Prey, 1989; Shadow Prey, 1990)—as evidenced by this strong and satisfying entry, in which the Minneapolis homicide cop tangles with two memorable psycho-killers. The killers are coldhearted burn-deformed actor Carlo Druze and handsome pill-crazed pathologist Michael Bekker, who lures Druze into a murder trade a la Strangers on a Train: Bekker's wife for Druze's boss. The novel opens with Druze sneaking into Bekker's house to slice Stephanie Bekker and (at Bekker's insistence) to mutilate her eyes—but it turns out that Stephanie has a lover, who sees Druze, then runs away. Who is he? And why the eye mutilation? These questions plague moody, perennially unhappy Davenport as he deals with the case, and with his own demons of depression. Though from the start suspecting Bekker (whose drug-soaked soliloquies, and hidden obsession with observing dying patients' eyes at the moment of death, cast him as an unusually fascinating villain), Davenport can't figure out the mad M.D.'s connection to the second victim, Druze's boss, also found with punched-out eyes. So when the mysterious eyewitness begins feeding anonymous clues about a deformed killer, and then a third victim—an innocent mistakenly identified by Druze as the eyewitness—surfaces, Davenport looks elsewhere. His search brings him to Druze's theater company and to sexy actress Cassie Lasch, who becomes Davenport's lover and (inevitably in Sandford's dark universe) Bekker's final victim—along with Druze, whom Bekker double-crosses. In a brutal finale, a semi-deranged Davenport, throwing his cop-career away, extracts a savage revenge upon Bekker—a revenge that leads to a last-page revelation of the eyewitness's surprising identity. Atmospheric, suspenseful, and gripping from start to finish.
Pub Date: April 4, 1991
ISBN: 0425214435
Page Count: 358
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1991
Brown’s novels share several qualities: They’re entertaining, competently written, full of twists and turns, but ultimately...
The perennially best-selling Brown checks in with another “woman-in-peril–hunky-guy-to-the-rescue” romantic thriller.
Emory, a wealthy Atlanta-based pediatrician who runs marathons, is training for an upcoming race in a remote mountainous region of North Carolina. She's left behind her self-centered husband, Jeff, with whom she’s had one of their frequent arguments; that’s fine with Jeff, who plans to spend Emory’s absence with his mistress. But then Emory’s plans go very wrong. She wakes up injured and disoriented in a strange cabin with a tall, gorgeous man who refuses to divulge his identity. The mystery man tells her she had an accident on the trail and he brought her back there to recover. Emory suffered a head wound and is both woozy and mistrustful of the stranger, but after a day or so, when she feels well enough to leave, she discovers the mountain road is covered with ice, socked in with a pea-soup fog and not at all navigable, so she heads back to the cabin without even trying to get home. As Emory falls in love with the tall stranger, her petulant husband comes under scrutiny by two small-town police detectives who believe he might not be telling them everything about his missing wife. Brown throws in some steamy sex, a mysterious mistress and an FBI agent who's searching for the mystery man. Brown knows how to pace her stories so fans will keep turning the pages, but while her prose is clean and efficient, readers searching for characters who rise above the stereotypical will be sorely disappointed in this plot-driven entry.
Brown’s novels share several qualities: They’re entertaining, competently written, full of twists and turns, but ultimately forgettable.Pub Date: Aug. 19, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4555-8112-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2014
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