The mystery’s barely there, but the company in this slapstick satire is so appealing that you’ll never miss it, especially...
A vegetarian Jewish bookmobile driver transplanted from London gets homesick.
Now settled in Tumdrum, Northern Ireland (The Case of the Missing Books, 2007, etc.), Israel Armstrong misses everything he left behind: Grodzinski’s cheesecake and espresso, his mates at The Bargain Bookstore, reading Booker prizewinners and, maybe most of all, his girlfriend Gloria. So when his boss Linda offers to send him and his bookmobile partner over to London to pick out a new van at the Mobile Meet, Israel is eager to go. Ted, by contrast, loves every rusty nut and bolt and engine whine in their van and doesn’t want to replace it. Then canny Israel bets Ted £1000 that their van won’t win the Meet’s Concours D’Elégance prize. And off they go. Alas, a stopover at Israel’s childhood home in Finchley has calamitous results. Ted chats up Israel’s mum, and, almost worse, their van is stolen, propelling Israel’s mum into organizational overdrive and sending the heroic pair on a wild chase after travelers who have repainted the van to resemble a New Age poster and decamped with it to initiate solstice rites at Stonehenge.
The mystery’s barely there, but the company in this slapstick satire is so appealing that you’ll never miss it, especially when Ted makes up more words than Mrs. Malaprop and Israel keeps bumping into reasons why London isn’t home anymore.Pub Date: Aug. 12, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-06-145200-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2008
This ran in the S.E.P. and resulted in more demands for the story in book form than ever recorded. Well, here it is and it is a honey. Imagine ten people, not knowing each other, not knowing why they were invited on a certain island house-party, not knowing their hosts. Then imagine them dead, one by one, until none remained alive, nor any clue to the murderer. Grand suspense, a unique trick, expertly handled.
Pub Date: Feb. 21, 1939
ISBN: 0062073478
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Dodd, Mead
Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1939
SEEN & HEARD
One protest from an outraged innocent says it all: “This is America. This is Wyoming.”
Once again, Wyoming game warden Joe Pickett gets mixed up in a killing whose principal suspect is his old friend Nate Romanowski, whose attempts to live off the grid keep breaking down in a series of felony charges.
If Judge Hewitt hadn’t bent over to pick up a spoon that had fallen from his dinner table, the sniper set up nearly a mile from his house in the gated community of the Eagle Mountain Club would have ended his life. As it was, the victim was Sue Hewitt, leaving the judge alive and free to rail and threaten anyone he suspected of the shooting. Incoming Twelve Sleep County Sheriff Brendan Kapelow’s interest in using the case to promote his political ambitions and the judge’s inability to see further than his nose make them the perfect targets for a frame-up of Nate, who just wants to be left alone in the middle of nowhere to train his falcons and help his bride, Liv Brannon, raise their baby, Kestrel. Nor are the sniper, the sheriff, and the judge Nate’s only enemies. Orlando Panfile has been sent to Wyoming by the Sinaloan drug cartel to avenge the deaths of the four assassins whose careers Nate and Joe ended last time out (Wolf Pack, 2019). So it’s up to Joe, with some timely data from his librarian wife, Marybeth, to hire a lawyer for Nate, make sure he doesn’t bust out of jail before his trial, identify the real sniper, who continues to take an active role in the proceedings, and somehow protect him from a killer who regards Nate’s arrest as an unwelcome complication. That’s quite a tall order for someone who can’t shoot straight, who keeps wrecking his state-issued vehicles, and whose appalling mother-in-law, Missy Vankeuren Hand, has returned from her latest European jaunt to suck up all the oxygen in Twelve Sleep County to hustle some illegal drugs for her cancer-stricken sixth husband. But fans of this outstanding series will know better than to place their money against Joe.
One protest from an outraged innocent says it all: “This is America. This is Wyoming.”Pub Date: March 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-525-53823-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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