Well-plotted suspenseful fun.
Ghost sightings and a copycat murder cause residents of a small town to revisit a 30-year-old crime.
Narrator Kate Cyphers, a middle-aged Seattle school nurse, returns in November 2002 to the Vermont hippie commune where she was raised. She’s there to look in on her elderly mother, who suffers from Alzheimer’s. But the night she arrives, a teenaged girl is murdered in exactly the manner Kate’s childhood friend Del was killed three decades earlier. Interspersed chapters flash back to 1971, when Kate first met Del, who lived on a dilapidated farm with her abusive father and her older brother Nicky. Kate became close to Del, but she didn’t dare be openly friendly toward someone taunted by the more popular students as “Potato Girl.” Back in 2002, both Nicky and 12-year-old Opal, the dwindling commune’s sole remaining child, tell Kate that they have seen visions of Del and think her ghost may be behind the new killing. Meanwhile, Kate’s mother is acting stranger than usual, stealing off in the night and referencing things that only Del could have known. The most definitive link between the two murders is a section of skin cut from each of the victims’ chests; only Kate knows that Del had the letter M tattooed on that spot. Clues point variously to Zack Messier, a former commune member who had affairs with Del, Nicky and Kate’s mother; to Mike Shane, a classmate who once wrote love notes to Del and now owns a tattoo parlor; and to Ron Mackenzie, the old school-bus driver who, though incoherent, seems to know more than he should. And we start to wonder about Kate when her Swiss Army Knife turns out to have been used to slit a cat’s throat—especially since she told us on the novel’s first page that she’d just killed someone.
Well-plotted suspenseful fun.Pub Date: April 10, 2007
ISBN: 0-06-114331-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2007
A murder is committed in a stalled transcontinental train in the Balkans, and every passenger has a watertight alibi. But Hercule Poirot finds a way.
**Note: This classic Agatha Christie mystery was originally published in England as Murder on the Orient Express, but in the United States as Murder in the Calais Coach. Kirkus reviewed the book in 1934 under the original US title, but we changed the title in our database to the now recognizable title Murder on the Orient Express. This is the only name now known for the book. The reason the US publisher, Dodd Mead, did not use the UK title in 1934 was to avoid confusion with the 1932 Graham Greene novel, Orient Express.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1934
ISBN: 978-0062073495
Page Count: -
Publisher: Dodd, Mead
Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1934
The parts with Nero Wolfe, the only character Goldsborough brings to life, are almost worth waiting for.
In Archie Goodwin's 15th adventure since the death of his creator, Rex Stout, his gossipy Aunt Edna Wainwright lures him from 34th Street to his carefully unnamed hometown in Ohio to investigate the death of a well-hated bank president.
Tom Blankenship, the local police chief, thinks there’s no case since Logan Mulgrew shot himself. But Archie’s mother, Marjorie Goodwin, and Aunt Edna know lots of people with reason to have killed him. Mulgrew drove rival banker Charles Purcell out of business, forcing Purcell to get work as an auto mechanic, and foreclosed on dairy farmer Harold Mapes’ spread. Lester Newman is convinced that Mulgrew murdered his ailing wife, Lester’s sister, so that he could romance her nurse, Carrie Yeager. And Donna Newman, Lester’s granddaughter, might have had an eye on her great-uncle’s substantial estate. Nor is Archie limited to mulling over his relatives’ gossip, for Trumpet reporter Verna Kay Padgett, whose apartment window was shot out the night her column raised questions about the alleged suicide, is perfectly willing to publish a floridly actionable summary of the leading suspects that delights her editor, shocks Archie, and infuriates everyone else. The one person missing is Archie’s boss, Nero Wolfe (Death of an Art Collector, 2019, etc.), and fans will breathe a sigh of relief when he appears at Marjorie’s door, debriefs Archie, notices a telltale clue, prepares dinner for everyone, sleeps on his discovery, and arranges a meeting of all parties in Marjorie’s living room in which he names the killer.
The parts with Nero Wolfe, the only character Goldsborough brings to life, are almost worth waiting for.Pub Date: May 19, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5040-5988-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Mysterious Press
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020
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