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FOUL MATTER

Aiken at her most serious, with neither fluff nor suspense—in a gloomy, drifty, faintly gothic modern-novel (adultery, death, soul-searching) that occasionally sends up flares of charm and poignancy. The largely unsatisfactory narrator/heroine: Clytie Churchill, 35, a talented British achiever (novelist, cookbook-writer, catering tycoon) who recalls her busy, death-haunted love life during an all-night rap session with a French doctor at a chateau. (Don't ask how Clytie wound up there: it's a foolishly contrived—and ineffectual—setup.) Clytie's first great love was journalist Dan, whom she married soon after the suicide of his first wife, death-obsessed poet Ingrid; but, hours after the wedding, Dan committed suicide too, perhaps taking his baby son along on the doomed boat-ride. (Clytie thinks the son may still be alive somewhere.) Then came simultaneous affairs with the husbands of Clytie's two best friends: tweedy architect Hugh, husband of maternal Elly; and sallow publisher George, husband of career-driven Chris. But, though both liaisons were initially dandy (with Elly and Chris cheerfully, unconvincingly, in the know), both men soon died—Hugh of lung cancer, George of an unspecified illness that made him mad, violent, then helpless. (In one of the book's best moments, his wife and mistress alternate reading Pride and Prejudice to the dying man.) And Clytie's most recent major affair has also been shadowed with death: five years back she loved local (Sussex) lawyer Anthony, whose pregnant wife had been killed in a motorcycle accident outside Clytie's house; but Anthony, a Catholic, angrily departed when he found out about Clytie's adulterous past. So now, unsurprisingly, Clytie is rather sour on love—and preoccupied with mortality. ("Goodbye, Anthony. Goodbye, my last love.") She is dubious about responding to the French doc's serious-minded courtship. And, after returning home to find her house burned to the ground (by Dan's crazy mother), she plans to open a pub in partnership with beautiful ex-prostitute Teddy. . . while Anthony becomes a monk. ("There's still a lot to do. . . . Promises to keep. Meals to cook. Friends to cherish.") Unfortunately, Clytie is a half-formed, unappealing Modern Woman—a shaky mix of feminism, enlightened promiscuity, sentimentality, and existential angst. The plotting, too, with its parade of violent demises and its halfhearted glimmers of mystery, is a rickety frame for serious thoughts on love and death. Still, for every creaky or pretentious moment, there's also a touching or disarming one (the supporting cast, the food-talk, the Sussex vignettes); and though Aiken fans won't find the usual pleasures here, they may be intermittently engaged by this uneven, ambitious blend of the morbid and the whimsical.

Pub Date: March 1, 1983

ISBN: 0385183712

Page Count: 264

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: April 12, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1983

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THE A LIST

Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...

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A convicted killer’s list of five people he wants dead runs the gamut from the wife he’s already had murdered to franchise heroine Ali Reynolds.

Back in the day, women came from all over to consult Santa Clarita fertility specialist Dr. Edward Gilchrist. Many of them left his care happily pregnant, never dreaming that the father of the babies they carried was none other than the physician himself, who donated his own sperm rather than that of the handsome, athletic, disease-free men pictured in his scrapbook. When Alexandra Munsey’s son, Evan, is laid low by the kidney disease he’s inherited from his biological father and she returns to Gilchrist in search of the donor’s medical records, the roof begins to fall in on him. By the time it’s done falling, he’s serving a life sentence in Folsom Prison for commissioning the death of his wife, Dawn, the former nurse and sometime egg donor who’d turned on him. With nothing left to lose, Gilchrist tattoos himself with the initials of five people he blames for his fall: Dawn; Leo Manuel Aurelio, the hit man he’d hired to dispose of her; Kaitlyn Todd, the nurse/receptionist who took Dawn’s place; Alex Munsey, whose search for records upset his apple cart; and Ali Reynolds, the TV reporter who’d helped put Alex in touch with the dozen other women who formed the Progeny Project because their children looked just like hers. No matter that Ali’s been out of both California and the news business for years; Gilchrist and his enablers know that revenge can’t possibly be served too cold. Wonder how far down that list they’ll get before Ali, aided once more by Frigg, the methodical but loose-cannon AI first introduced in Duel to the Death (2018), turns on them?

Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how little the boundary-challenged AI, who gets into the case more or less inadvertently, differs from your standard human sidekick with issues.

Pub Date: April 2, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-5011-5101-9

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019

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BOOK OF THE DEAD

Proceed at your own risk.

Pioneering pathologist Kay Scarpetta (Trace, 2004, etc.) goes up against a wraithlike killer whose self-appointed mission is to “relieve others of their suffering.”

Practice, practice, practice. If only 16-year-old South Carolina tennis phenom Drew Martin had stuck to the court instead of going off to Rome to party, her tortured corpse wouldn’t be baffling the Italian authorities, headed inexplicably by medico legale Capt. Ottorino Poma, and the International Investigative Response team, which includes both Scarpetta and her lover, forensic psychologist Benton Wesley. But the young woman’s murder and the gruesome forensic riddles it poses are something of a sideshow to the main event: the obligatory maundering of the continuing cast. Wesley still won’t leave Boston for the woman he tepidly insists he loves. Scarpetta’s niece, computer whiz Lucy Farinelli, continues to be jealously protective of her aunt. Scarpetta’s investigator, Pete Marino, is so besotted by the trailer-trash pickup who’s pushing his buttons that he does some terrible things. And Scarpetta herself is threatened by every misfit in the known universe, from a disgruntled mortician to oracular TV shrink Marilyn Self. Cornwell’s trademark forensics have long since been matched by Karin Slaughter and CSI. What’s most distinctive about this venerable franchise is the kitchen-sink plotting; the soap-opera melodrama that prevents any given volume from coming to a satisfying end; and the emphasis on titanic battles between Scarpetta and a series of Antichrists.

Proceed at your own risk.

Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2007

ISBN: 978-0-399-15393-8

Page Count: 416

Publisher: Putnam

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2007

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