Steeped in melancholic reverie and spot-on Manhattan detail, Terry’s noir saga doesn’t make it as mystery, but sparkles as a...
New York private eye Terry Orr is still struggling to recover from the subway murder of his wife Marina and infant son Davy (Closing Time, 2001). The events of September 11 have only exacerbated his constant grief, but there are optimistic signs as well. His teenaged daughter Bella seems well-adjusted and brings boundless joy to her father. Friends are looking out for Terry, and there’s a hint of romance with an ADA named Julie. These developments overshadow the mystery swirling around Sonia Salgado, recently free after serving a 30-year sentence for a crime she committed as a teenager. As a favor to Mrs. Maoli, his housekeeper, Terry agrees to help elderly Dorotea Salgado reunite her hardened ex-con daughter with the grandson she has never met. But Terry’s first meeting with Sonia is the discovery of her corpse. Despite harassment by the police, Terry tracks several unprosecuted accomplices from Sonia’s crime—the murder of a diamond merchant and the theft of nearly a million in unrecovered jewels—from Ahmed Hassan, now a prominent theater director under a different name, to thug Alfie Bascomb, who gives Terry a severe beating to drive him off the case. Terry’s probing also attracts the attention of shady cop Tommy Mangionella, a.k.a. Tommy Mango, and slick Hispanic civic leader Danny Villa, for reasons both obscure and suspicious. In between battles with his own personal demons, Terry ferrets out and fingers those from Sonia’s past.
Steeped in melancholic reverie and spot-on Manhattan detail, Terry’s noir saga doesn’t make it as mystery, but sparkles as a literary event.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-399-14931-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2002
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
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