Though it brings the horrors of the other Victorians perhaps too literally to life, this first novel from historian Wilson...
This epistolary sequel to The Woman in White sets Wilkie Collins’s hero the herculean task of writing a life of the legendary English painter J.M.W. Turner.
In response to the fears of Lady Elizabeth Eastlake, wife of the National Gallery director, that Walter Thornbury’s forthcoming biography of Turner will be too vitriolic to take its subject’s true measure, Walter Hartright, himself an artist, agrees to undertake a life of his own. The task of reconstructing his subject from the clues he can find in the painter’s lodgings and studios and from among his friends and colleagues originally seems daunting enough, since some acquaintances, like the painter George Jones, refuse to talk to Walter; others, like influential critic John Ruskin, speak so oracularly that they are little more helpful; and others still, like the artist’s housekeeper Mrs. Booth, will unburden themselves only to Walter’s sister-in-law Marian Halcombe. But the real difficulties lie deeper. Turner, who inspired wildly contradictory opinions while he was alive, had a pathological fear of public appearances—he hated being painted, was never photographed under circumstances that would identify him as that Turner, and often conducted his irregular domestic arrangements under an alias—all of which made disagreements about him nearly impossible to resolve. As Walter traces the artist’s steps through country villas and London alleys, naively secure in his determination to unearth the truth about this wild genius, he sinks instead more and more deeply into the life he is supposed to be investigating, neglecting his fairy-tale wife Laura and their two children back in Limmeridge. Not even Marian, when she takes over the research from Walter, can avoid Turner’s infernal pull.
Though it brings the horrors of the other Victorians perhaps too literally to life, this first novel from historian Wilson (The Earth Shall Weep, 1999), taking its cue as much from A.S. Byatt as from Collins, is a powerfully somber meditation on the impossibility of writing a life.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-87113-831-X
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
Irritatingly trite woman-in-periler from lawyer-turned-novelist Baldacci. Moving away from the White House and the white-shoe Washington law firms of his previous bestsellers (Absolute Power, 1996; Total Control, 1997), Baldacci comes up with LuAnn Tyler, a spunky, impossibly beautiful, white-trash truck stop waitress with a no-good husband and a terminally cute infant daughter in tow. Some months after the birth of Lisa, LuAnn gets a phone call summoning her to a make-shift office in an unrented storefront of the local shopping mall. There, she gets a Faustian offer from a Mr. Jackson, a monomaniacal, cross-dressing manipulator who apparently knows the winning numbers in the national lottery before the numbers are drawn. It seems that LuAnn fits the media profile of what a lottery winner should be—poor, undereducated but proud—and if she's willing to buy the right ticket at the right time and transfer most of her winnings to Jackson, she'll be able to retire in luxury. Jackson fails to inform her, however, that if she refuses his offer, he'll have her killed. Before that can happen, as luck would have it, LuAnn barely escapes death when one of husband Duane's drug deals goes bad. She hops on a first-class Amtrak sleeper to Manhattan with a hired executioner in pursuit. But executioner Charlie, one of Jackson's paid handlers, can't help but hear wedding bells when he sees LuAnn cooing with her daughter. Alas, a winning $100- million lottery drawing complicates things. Jackson spirits LuAnn and Lisa away to Sweden, with Charlie in pursuit. Never fear. Not only will LuAnn escape a series of increasingly violent predicaments, but she'll also outwit Jackson, pay an enormous tax bill to the IRS, and have enough left over to honeymoon in Switzerland. Too preposterous to work as feminine wish-fulfillment, too formulaic to be suspenseful. (Book-of-the-Month Club main selection)
Pub Date: Dec. 2, 1997
ISBN: 0-446-52259-7
Page Count: 528
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1997
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