by Jessa Maxwell ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 7, 2023
A delicious concoction: two shakes Agatha Christie and a cup of Great British Bake Off.
Six contestants. A big white tent on the grounds of an aging estate. It’s a bake-off...in Vermont? And the winner might just be the one who survives.
Hannah. Gerald. Pradyumna. Lottie. Peter. Stella. These six bakers are selected to compete in the 10th season of Bake Week, a TV show filmed in the mountains of Vermont at Grafton Manor, the family estate of cookbook legend Betsy Martin. Betsy has been successfully hosting the show and judging the baked goods of amateur American bakers for 10 years; this year, however, a few things are different. First of all, the producers have insisted on appointing a co-host designed to appeal to a younger audience, a male chef known for his hard-as-nails critiques on another cooking show as well as his million-dollar smile. Second of all, at least one of the contestants is not who they say they are. Once a body is found, dripping blood into a cake—don’t worry, no one eats it—it’s clear that someone has taken the competition a little too far. There's a delightful balance of baking details and intrigue as the bakers compete through different challenges and we become privy to their secret motives and how far each is willing to go to win. The contestants hit all the character types: the beautiful ingénue, the neurotic scientist, the fluffy old woman, the bored millionaire, the anxious newbie, and the rustic craftsman. We are treated to their backstories and to some of their internal dialogue, but this is a novel that also rests comfortably, nostalgically, in its sense of formula. Despite the American setting, it’s not hard to imagine these characters creeping around the halls and grounds of a moldering British manor in the tradition of the best locked-room mysteries.
A delicious concoction: two shakes Agatha Christie and a cup of Great British Bake Off.Pub Date: March 7, 2023
ISBN: 978-1-6680-0800-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Dec. 13, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
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by Richard Wright ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 20, 2021
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.
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A falsely accused Black man goes into hiding in this masterful novella by Wright (1908-1960), finally published in full.
Written in 1941 and '42, between Wright’s classics Native Son and Black Boy, this short novel concerns Fred Daniels, a modest laborer who’s arrested by police officers and bullied into signing a false confession that he killed the residents of a house near where he was working. In a brief unsupervised moment, he escapes through a manhole and goes into hiding in a sewer. A series of allegorical, surrealistic set pieces ensues as Fred explores the nether reaches of a church, a real estate firm, and a jewelry store. Each stop is an opportunity for Wright to explore themes of hope, greed, and exploitation; the real estate firm, Wright notes, “collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in rent from poor colored folks.” But Fred’s deepening existential crisis and growing distance from society keep the scenes from feeling like potted commentaries. As he wallpapers his underground warren with cash, mocking and invalidating the currency, he registers a surrealistic but engrossing protest against divisive social norms. The novel, rejected by Wright’s publisher, has only appeared as a substantially truncated short story until now, without the opening setup and with a different ending. Wright's take on racial injustice seems to have unsettled his publisher: A note reveals that an editor found reading about Fred’s treatment by the police “unbearable.” That may explain why Wright, in an essay included here, says its focus on race is “rather muted,” emphasizing broader existential themes. Regardless, as an afterword by Wright’s grandson Malcolm attests, the story now serves as an allegory both of Wright (he moved to France, an “exile beyond the reach of Jim Crow and American bigotry”) and American life. Today, it resonates deeply as a story about race and the struggle to envision a different, better world.
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.Pub Date: April 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-59853-676-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Library of America
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2021
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BOOK TO SCREEN
by Kathy Reichs ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 17, 2020
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
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