Beguiling. For fans of mysteries, postmodern fiction and fine bookmaking: a book that makes demands of its reader, but that...
A delightful, endlessly unfolding fiction that is meta beyond meta, a sort of Da Vinci Code for smart people.
When lead author Abrams isn’t busy rebooting the Star Trek film series, he’s cooking up puzzles, mysteries and legerdemain. With lieutenant Dorst (Alive in Necropolis, 2008, etc.), he’s conjured up a fine frame on which to hang the enterprise: a sort of gothic romance—though of the Horace Walpole rather than Barbara Cartland sort—called Ship of Theseus (a title that, as game theory enthusiasts will know, itself conjures up a thorny philosophical puzzle). Written by a Poe-esque poet named V. M. Straka, the invented piece is a study in gloominess: “The stolen look becomes a prolonged study, not of the devastation but of the figure he notices skulking at the foot of the port’s only lighthouse, hidden from the shooters and watching S. recede into the dark, perhaps even waving once before S. disappears from view.” Weaving its way through this book is a second story, marginal notes exchanged by a young man and young woman who sometimes flirt and sometimes fret, puzzling over Straka’s yarn while gabbing their way toward resolution over their own lives (“I seriously doubt your dad is some evil Bouchard person.” “I know. But it makes the marketing job even more repulsive. Don’t want to be any part of that world.” “Hard to avoid. Maybe impossible.”) The twin narratives, spinning in and out of each other like loopy helixes, are absorbing enough, but the most impressive thing about this shaggy-dog story is its physical form: a book that looks every bit like the 1949-issue stolen library book that it is supposed to be, hatched with doodles and annotations and underlinings, its pages full of laid-in treasures: postcards, letters, notes, photographs and, yes, a decoder wheel. The book is a simulacrum as wondrous as the one the protagonist of Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore invents—and if this book has a spiritual twin, it’s Robin Sloan’s lively 2012 tale.
Beguiling. For fans of mysteries, postmodern fiction and fine bookmaking: a book that makes demands of its reader, but that amply entertains in return.Pub Date: Oct. 29, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-316-20164-3
Page Count: 472
Publisher: Mulholland Books/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 19, 2013
PROFILES
Packed with riveting drama and painful truths, this book powerfully illustrates the devastation of abuse—and the strength of...
Hoover’s (November 9, 2015, etc.) latest tackles the difficult subject of domestic violence with romantic tenderness and emotional heft.
At first glance, the couple is edgy but cute: Lily Bloom runs a flower shop for people who hate flowers; Ryle Kincaid is a surgeon who says he never wants to get married or have kids. They meet on a rooftop in Boston on the night Ryle loses a patient and Lily attends her abusive father’s funeral. The provocative opening takes a dark turn when Lily receives a warning about Ryle’s intentions from his sister, who becomes Lily’s employee and close friend. Lily swears she’ll never end up in another abusive home, but when Ryle starts to show all the same warning signs that her mother ignored, Lily learns just how hard it is to say goodbye. When Ryle is not in the throes of a jealous rage, his redeeming qualities return, and Lily can justify his behavior: “I think we needed what happened on the stairwell to happen so that I would know his past and we’d be able to work on it together,” she tells herself. Lily marries Ryle hoping the good will outweigh the bad, and the mother-daughter dynamics evolve beautifully as Lily reflects on her childhood with fresh eyes. Diary entries fancifully addressed to TV host Ellen DeGeneres serve as flashbacks to Lily’s teenage years, when she met her first love, Atlas Corrigan, a homeless boy she found squatting in a neighbor’s house. When Atlas turns up in Boston, now a successful chef, he begs Lily to leave Ryle. Despite the better option right in front of her, an unexpected complication forces Lily to cut ties with Atlas, confront Ryle, and try to end the cycle of abuse before it’s too late. The relationships are portrayed with compassion and honesty, and the author’s note at the end that explains Hoover’s personal connection to the subject matter is a must-read.
Packed with riveting drama and painful truths, this book powerfully illustrates the devastation of abuse—and the strength of the survivors.Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5011-1036-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2016
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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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