A fine murder mystery, in the style of Agatha Christie, with a hawk-eyed protagonist and bevy of suspects.
In Ayer’s (Tales of Chinkapin Creek, Volume II, 2012, etc.) mystery novel, the accidental death of an affluent alcoholic may, in fact, be a simple case of murder.
It’s the first party of the summer in French Haven, Maine, at George Wollaston’s home, and many of the guests are inebriated. Afterward, caterer Richard Grassie finds George dead from an apparent fall down the backyard steps. It’s initially viewed as an unfortunate accident; George had a similar stumble just last year. But it turns out that there’s no shortage of people who wanted to see him dead—including his wife, Margaret, who blames him for their son’s suicide, and his teenage daughter, Angie, whom he’d humiliated by loudly disapproving of her attire at the party. When cops find evidence that George may have been drugged, nearly everyone at the party becomes a suspect. It’s up to amateur sleuth Richard, along with police chief Eliot Perham and Detective Le Bel, to solve the murder. Richard is initially afraid he might forget details about that night, so he writes down everything he can remember for the police; it’s a plot point that functions superbly, as it provides a logical reason for him to work with Chief Eliot. It also inserts some drama into the story, as his notes also cause police to question his friend and co-worker Flora. Fans of traditional whodunits will be delighted with this tale, as it exuberantly follows many genre conventions, including suspects who may not be murderers but definitely have secrets to hide. Ayer sets the mystery in the 1980s, which adds to its classic mystery appeal, as there’s no modern technology in sight. The story’s most remarkable element, however, is the way it tackles the serious issue of alcoholism. George’s addiction, for example, has devastated his family, and Richard’s own father was also a heavy drinker. Alcohol even has detrimental consequences for the murder case, as one guest’s intoxication makes her an unreliable witness.
A fine murder mystery, in the style of Agatha Christie, with a hawk-eyed protagonist and bevy of suspects.Pub Date: April 17, 2014
ISBN: 978-1484980675
Page Count: 272
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
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