This is a mildly entertaining yet ill-conceived fictional solution to one of science's great whodunits: Who perpetrated the infamous Piltdown Man hoax? The Piltdown escapade dates back to 1908 when Charles Dawson, a solicitor and amateur scientist, ``discovered'' skull fragments of an ancient humanlike creature in a gravel pit on Piltdown Common in southern England. This debut novel recounts Dawson's imaginary confession that he himself had surreptitiously planted the bones in an effort to embarrass the professional scientific community. Over the next few years Dawson and his co-conspirator, the French Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, ``found'' several more pieces of bone that eventually yielded a nearly complete skull. The hoax succeeded beyond Dawson's wildest expectations. Eminent scientists proclaimed that the skull belonged to a new species of extinct human. It wasn't until 1954, 37 years after Dawson's death, that scientists realized the skull was a cleverly assembled hodgepodge of chimpanzee teeth, an orangutan jaw, and a modern human cranium (the actual perpetrator has never been conclusively identified, although Dawson and Teilhard are leading suspects). The narrative concerning the hoax is convincing, and it contains actual historical material. But Schwartz spices things up by including Sir Arthur Conan Doyle as a major character, which leads him to weave in the obligatory murder mystery. Doyle, of course, solves the murders Ö la Sherlock Holmes. Predictably, evangelical Christians are the killers, and Schwartz uses this as a contrived platform for anti-fundamentalist polemics. Unfortunately, he never drops clues throughout the novel that would enable the reader to solve the crimes, and the guilty parties are introduced only a few pages before they are exposed. As murder mysteries go, it's pretty lame, and the book never lives up to its promise, despite a clever and amusing twist at the very end. (Illustrations)
Pub Date: July 21, 1994
ISBN: 0-312-11043-X
Page Count: 256
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1994
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
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