by Jane Langton ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 1996
Homer Kelly is nervous about his stint as a visiting fellow in American literature at Keble College, but he'd relax if he knew that the elevated Oxford body count will make him feel right at home. There's a night watchman killed in a mysterious fall from a college roof (what was Bobby Fenwick doing up there, anyway?); there's misfit mail-clerk Johnny Farfrae, who dies after a similar nasty fall outside his wife Helen's office; and there's the severed throat of Rev. Oliver Clare, a divinity student who seemed destined even before that to lose Freddy Dubchick to Hal Shaw, a just-married tutor in biology working under Helen's boss, Freddy's naturalist father, Prof. William Dubchick. It's not till the third killing, in fact, that Langton's whimsical, fitfully entertaining tale really takes off with a plot that binds Dubchick's researches to the dispute between those other twin eminences, Charles Darwin and his 19th-century contemporary, ferocious anti-Darwinist Bishop Arthur Clare, Oliver's great-great-great-great granduncle. Along the way, there'll be a large, stolen 1651 painting of a dodo, a reverse burglary in which some crafty felon sneaks dozens of crustaceans (in jars labeled "Chutney," "Peach Preserves," and "Griskin of Pork") into the Oxford Museum, and enough outrageous behavior to flabbergast the bemused detective—though "of course," as Langton points out, "the state of being flabbergasted was normal for Homer." Flickers of gently effective satire compete with kitchen-sink plotting, but still leave Homer's 12th case (The Shortest Day, 1995, etc.) below the level of his best.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-670-86221-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1996
Share your opinion of this book
More by Jane Langton
BOOK REVIEW
by Jane Langton
BOOK REVIEW
by Jane Langton
BOOK REVIEW
by Jane Langton
by J.A. Jance ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 2, 2019
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
Awards & Accolades
Likes
29
Our Verdict
GET IT
New York Times Bestseller
A convicted killer’s list of five people he wants dead runs the gamut from the wife he’s already had murdered to franchise heroine Ali Reynolds.
Back in the day, women came from all over to consult Santa Clarita fertility specialist Dr. Edward Gilchrist. Many of them left his care happily pregnant, never dreaming that the father of the babies they carried was none other than the physician himself, who donated his own sperm rather than that of the handsome, athletic, disease-free men pictured in his scrapbook. When Alexandra Munsey’s son, Evan, is laid low by the kidney disease he’s inherited from his biological father and she returns to Gilchrist in search of the donor’s medical records, the roof begins to fall in on him. By the time it’s done falling, he’s serving a life sentence in Folsom Prison for commissioning the death of his wife, Dawn, the former nurse and sometime egg donor who’d turned on him. With nothing left to lose, Gilchrist tattoos himself with the initials of five people he blames for his fall: Dawn; Leo Manuel Aurelio, the hit man he’d hired to dispose of her; Kaitlyn Todd, the nurse/receptionist who took Dawn’s place; Alex Munsey, whose search for records upset his apple cart; and Ali Reynolds, the TV reporter who’d helped put Alex in touch with the dozen other women who formed the Progeny Project because their children looked just like hers. No matter that Ali’s been out of both California and the news business for years; Gilchrist and his enablers know that revenge can’t possibly be served too cold. Wonder how far down that list they’ll get before Ali, aided once more by Frigg, the methodical but loose-cannon AI first introduced in Duel to the Death (2018), turns on them?
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how little the boundary-challenged AI, who gets into the case more or less inadvertently, differs from your standard human sidekick with issues.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5101-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
Share your opinion of this book
More by J.A. Jance
BOOK REVIEW
by J.A. Jance
BOOK REVIEW
by J.A. Jance
BOOK REVIEW
by J.A. Jance
by Patricia Cornwell ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 23, 2007
Proceed at your own risk.
Pioneering pathologist Kay Scarpetta (Trace, 2004, etc.) goes up against a wraithlike killer whose self-appointed mission is to “relieve others of their suffering.”
Practice, practice, practice. If only 16-year-old South Carolina tennis phenom Drew Martin had stuck to the court instead of going off to Rome to party, her tortured corpse wouldn’t be baffling the Italian authorities, headed inexplicably by medico legale Capt. Ottorino Poma, and the International Investigative Response team, which includes both Scarpetta and her lover, forensic psychologist Benton Wesley. But the young woman’s murder and the gruesome forensic riddles it poses are something of a sideshow to the main event: the obligatory maundering of the continuing cast. Wesley still won’t leave Boston for the woman he tepidly insists he loves. Scarpetta’s niece, computer whiz Lucy Farinelli, continues to be jealously protective of her aunt. Scarpetta’s investigator, Pete Marino, is so besotted by the trailer-trash pickup who’s pushing his buttons that he does some terrible things. And Scarpetta herself is threatened by every misfit in the known universe, from a disgruntled mortician to oracular TV shrink Marilyn Self. Cornwell’s trademark forensics have long since been matched by Karin Slaughter and CSI. What’s most distinctive about this venerable franchise is the kitchen-sink plotting; the soap-opera melodrama that prevents any given volume from coming to a satisfying end; and the emphasis on titanic battles between Scarpetta and a series of Antichrists.
Proceed at your own risk.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-399-15393-8
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2007
Share your opinion of this book
More About This Book
BOOK TO SCREEN
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Hey there, book lover.
We’re glad you found a book that interests you!
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Don’t fret. We’ll find you.