A one-of-a-kind mystery that will appeal most to a niche audience of hosta aficionados.
In this mystery, a gardener unravels the story of what happened to his missing friend with some help from an unusual source.
Herman Funk—“Funky” to those who know him well—is an unassuming man with a passion for hosta plants. His life as a professional gardener is mostly one of quiet activity as he tends to his clients’ foliage and tries to warn people about the dangers of climate change. Then he starts hearing disembodied voices as he works in the garden. The messages seem to be a riddle he’s meant to solve, but who, or what, is sending them? And could they be somehow connected to the mysterious disappearance of Funky’s former client, Elisabeth Burgess, a decade prior? Meanwhile, a Mexican immigrant named Demetrio Perez gets ensnared in the mystery when he starts working for a sketchy character who’s also a hosta fanatic. Henry (Writing Workplace Cultures, 2000) subtitles his debut work of fiction “a magical realist gardening mystery,” and it’s an appropriate description for this quirky, creative novel. In it, hostas are revealed to be sentient beings with a complex, nuanced system of communication. The author writes numerous chapters from these plants’ perspectives, and they have personalities as varied as the humans who tend them. Along the way, Henry also weaves in plenty of details about the care and planting of hostas. (The author serves on the board of the American Hosta Society, and the book was first serialized in that society’s online journal.) His efforts will surely delight fellow hosta enthusiasts, and those who know little about the popular perennials will come away with a greater knowledge of them. There are plenty of hosta jokes along the way; when a character asks Funky what he thinks of Spilt Milk, a hosta variety, Funky replies, “No sense crying over it.” Unfortunately, the novel spends so much time delving into the details of rearing hostas that it takes a while for the core mystery to get going. However, patient readers will be rewarded with a unique whodunit that touches on important environmental issues.
A one-of-a-kind mystery that will appeal most to a niche audience of hosta aficionados.Pub Date: May 1, 2017
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 566
Publisher: Cedarwood Press
Review Posted Online: May 25, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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