Nothing in Pears's five archly amusing art mysteries (Giotto's Hand, p. 839; The Last Judgement, 1996, etc.) hints at the range or depth or boldness of this multifaceted scrutiny of a murder case in Restoration Oxford. Opinionated, influential Dr. Robert Grove is poisoned with arsenic in his New College lodgings. A missing signet ring leads his colleagues to his former servant (and rumored strumpet) Sarah Blundy, who, swiftly brought to trial, confesses and is promptly hanged—and dissected by enthusiastic physician Richard Lower. But the crime, evidently so simple in its events, is presented through the distorting lenses of four narrators whose obsessions place it in dramatically different contexts. Visiting Venetian Marco da Cola, a dandy trained in medicine, who has been treating Sarah's ailing mother Anne, grieves for the ruin of mother and daughter and the wreck of his own friendship with Lower. Sarah's former lover Jack Prestcott, an undergraduate jailed for attacking his guardian, is consumed with proving that his exiled father was hounded to his death innocent of the charge of treason the returning monarch Charles II's supporters had lodged against him. Dr. John Wallis, mathematician and divine, sees no inconsistency between his endless petty intrigues on behalf of Charles's scheming minister Henry Bennet and his vituperative condemnation of Sarah. In the brilliantly illuminated world in which medical experiments, religious and political debates between Roundheads and Royalists, and the founding of the Royal Society bring debates about the nature of science, history, religion, and authority into a focus whose sharpness has a special urgency for our own time, each of these narrators has his own slashingly conflicting claims to make. But it's not until the final narrator, burrowing historian Anthony Wood, weighs in to judge among the sharply competing visions of the earlier narrators that Pears produces his most memorable surprises, or unveils his deepest mysteries. Rashomon meets The Name of the Rose in a triumphant triple-decker that knocks every speck of dust from the historical mystery. (First printing of 80,000; $150,000 ad/promo; Book-of-the-Month main selection)
Pub Date: March 9, 1998
ISBN: 1-57322-082-5
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1997
Hollywood whodunit meets domestic delight.
The very old and the very young occupy the attention of Savannah Reid of the Moonlight Magnolia detective agency (Bitter Brew, 2018, etc.).
Savannah knows that helping her handsome husband, Sgt. Dirk Coulter, isn’t always a walk in the park. But nothing prepares her for the challenge pint-sized Brody Greyson provides when she and Dirk try to arrest his mother outside the drug den they’ve been staking out. After whupping Dirk upside the head, along with every other body part his tiny hands can reach, Brody is so tuckered out that bighearted Savannah takes him home to rest at her place, where she shares space with resident cats Cleo and Diamante and her Granny Reid’s old hound dog, the Colonel. Brody turns out to be so sweet and gentle when he isn’t seeing his mother hauled off to the slammer that Savannah almost hates to leave him behind with Granny when she gets a call from film star Ethan Malloy begging her to find out who killed his old friend Lucinda Faraday. Lucinda was a knockout in her day, but 40 years past her prime, she’s died withered and abandoned in her palatial estate with no one but companion Mary Mahoney to look after her. One room at a time, her massive house filled with clutter until Mary discovered her strangled corpse on a heap of old pizza boxes and expensive clothes that never saw the light of day. Sharp-tongued Lucinda has left behind enough enemies to provide plenty of suspects for Savannah and Dirk to grill. Their adventures at work and on the home front are utterly predictable, but they’re such a game pair that you can’t help but root for what you know darn well is coming.
Hollywood whodunit meets domestic delight.Pub Date: April 28, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-4967-2013-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Kensington
Review Posted Online: Jan. 26, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
By turns grim and giddy, this is a good read in the service of dark cops.
Savage dope dealers, dirty cops, corrupt officials, and a few hapless civilians mix it up in New York City.
After The Cartel (2015), Winslow follows the drug trade onto the streets. The Manhattan North Special Task Force is a lightly supervised assemblage of “the smartest, the toughest, the quickest, the bravest, the best, the baddest” cops in the NYPD, and Denny Malone commands a happily representative task force squad: his boyhood pal Phil Russo; big, black Bill Montague, who dresses like an Ivy League professor; and Billy O’Neill, the youngest. The book opens with Malone in a federal lockup—how he got there unfolds in breakneck flashbacks told in the cadences and vocabulary of a cop’s speech. The pivotal, but by no means the first, of his many indiscretions is skimming $4 million and 20 kilos of heroin from the scene of a major bust. He also executes the kingpin, and in the raid, Billy is killed. The narrative picks up five months later, and the legal and extralegal exploits of the task force are detailed. The reader is asked to admire the effectiveness of their policing while condemning their methods—Joseph Wambaugh did it better. Malone’s brother, Liam, a firefighter, was killed on 9/11, and that horrific disaster for first responders forms a grim attitudinal backdrop to their days. Malone and the boys are dirty cops: they take and deliver payoffs, ignore the demands of the Black Lives Matter movement, and administer crude vigilante justice. Drugs are gotten off the street, though some may go up their noses or into their lungs. Eventually Malone is trapped, caught on tape offering to broker a payoff to an assistant district attorney. He cuts a deal to name lawyers but not cops, but corrupt prosecutors and deceitful administrators confound him. His alternatives shrink; more deals are made and abrogated. Are Malone’s crimes an inescapable consequence of his working conditions? Must the police break the law to keep the peace?
By turns grim and giddy, this is a good read in the service of dark cops.Pub Date: June 20, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-06-266441-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2017
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