For readers up to the challenge, this mystery is a curious, gilded oddity that’s well worth the time and effort.
Mason (Tor’s Lake, 2015) brings back an engaging protagonist in this serpentine mystery about an obsessed estate owner and a murdered professor.
Elizabeth Cromwell is a San Francisco–based professional dominatrix and the owner of an unusual sex-work business called the English Department. Over the years, she’d become the obsession of Burleigh Polk, a wealthy man who’d displayed an enormous painting of her in his hallway. At the novel’s start, Cromwell is contacted by an investigator who’s working to distribute Polk’s considerable assets in the wake of his tragic death. These assets include several books stamped with her name, with some hollowed out and containing statuettes in her likeness. While perusing Polk’s empty house to retrieve her belongings and view the painting, Cromwell has a chance encounter with University of California, Berkeley, mathematics professor Robert Lavoisier, which ignites a series of intriguing events. He urgently invites her to join him at a nearby bar, but when she arrives there, she discovers that he’s been poisoned. An anonymous person then calls her and demands to know where Lavoisier’s laptop is, believing that she had stolen it. The tough and clever Cromwell at first dismisses the murder as nothing that should concern her—a mere “dysfunctional annoyance”—but soon, as the mystery intensifies, she begins to focus and investigate not only Lavoisier’s death, but also who exactly Polk was and the reasons why he was so obsessed with her. Along the way, she matches wits with the accusatory caller, who turns out to be another Berkeley math professor named Andrei Andreyev. After his suspicions about her are quelled, the case morphs into a formidable whodunit as clues stack up. More intensive scrutiny of Polk’s belongings further reveal the deceased’s dedicated interest in Cromwell’s image; meanwhile, Mason makes sure that sparks begin to fly between Cromwell and Andrei as they try to solve the murder together, with both of them questioning the circumstances of their alliance: “Is tragedy driving us together?” Mason’s novel is a truly complex concoction that won’t always be easy for readers to digest. However, it’s not only fast-paced and intelligent, but also engagingly atmospheric. Specifically, she exhibits a great practical knowledge of Northern California, particularly its sprawling businesses and notable landmarks, and this gives the entire narrative a sense of place that readers will find to be truly satisfying. The text offers many flourishes of embellished language, particularly after the story introduces a gaggle of dogged detectives on the case, who seem to meet their match in Cromwell, whose bossy, manipulative style and sharp, steely intellect win the day. Also of note is a chapter in which the protagonist gets to fully demonstrate the acumen of her erotic livelihood in her seductive domination of Andreyev. The mystery somewhat convolutedly wraps up with the aid of some masterfully deductive reasoning from Andreyev and Cromwell involving multiple interpretations of a doctoral thesis.
For readers up to the challenge, this mystery is a curious, gilded oddity that’s well worth the time and effort.Pub Date: May 15, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9980221-0-9
Page Count: 310
Publisher: Exponential Press
Review Posted Online: March 6, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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