First-rate Hess: crackling dialogue, winning characters, and an ingenious puzzle.
Perennially put-upon bookseller Claire Malloy (A Holly, Jolly Murder, 1999, etc.) is marching to an assertive new beat these days. She may have been impoverished by the untimely demise of her philandering husband Carlton, frustrated beyond belief at the adolescent angst of her daughter Caron, betrayed by her boyfriend Peter, and left in the lurch by convention chair Sally Fromberger, who’s had the bad grace to be hospitalized with deep venal thrombosis on the eve of Farberville College’s “Murder Comes to Campus” conference. But Claire refuses to play nursemaid to the four quarrelsome authors—Laureen Parks (gothic novels), Sherry Lynne Blackstone (cat detectives), Walter Dahl, (psychological thrillers), and Dilys Knoxwood (cozies)—who arrive for the festivities along with sweet-as-pie bestseller Alexandra Cruzetti and her editor, Roxanne Small. Instead, she presses Caron and her best friend Inez into taxi duty; browbeats Lily Twiller, proprietor of the environmentally correct Azalea Inn into allowing Laureen to smoke in her room; wrangles Sherry Lynne’s feline traveling companion Wimple onto her sun-porch; and tirelessly exhorts the authors to quit bickering and get on with the show. She even succeeds in getting the pregnant, truculent English department secretary to let her leave several cartons of to-be-autographed books in the lecture hall. Getting them out, however, turns into a problem when Arnie Riggles, weekend custodian, turns up cold-cocked in the Azalea Inn’s cistern, along with a very dead Roxanne Small, sending Claire into an immediate heads-on with ex-beau Peter, Farberville’s chief of police.
First-rate Hess: crackling dialogue, winning characters, and an ingenious puzzle.Pub Date: July 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-312-24662-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
O'Brien proves to be the Oliver Stone of literature, reiterating the same Vietnam stories endlessly without adding any insight. Politician John Wade has just lost an election, and he and his wife, Kathy, have retired to a lakeside cabin to plan their future when she suddenly disappears. O'Brien manages to stretch out this simple premise by sticking in chapters consisting of quotes from various sources (both actual and fictional) that relate to John and Kathy. An unnamed author — an irritating device that recalls the better-handled but still imperfect "Tim O'Brien" narrator of The Things They Carried (1990) — also includes lengthy footnotes about his own experiences in Vietnam. While the sections covering John in the third person are dry, these first-person footnotes are unbearable. O'Brien uses a coy tone (it's as though he's constantly whispering "Ooooh, spooky!"), but there is no suspense: The reader is acquainted with Kathy for only a few pages before her disappearance, so it's impossible to work up any interest in her fate. The same could be said of John, even though he is the focus of the book. Flashbacks and quotes reveal that John was present at the infamous Thuan Yen massacre (for those too thick-headed to understand the connection to My Lai, O'Brien includes numerous real-life references). The symbolism here is beyond cloying. As a child John liked to perform magic tricks, and he was subsequently nicknamed "Sorcerer" by his fellow soldiers — he could make things disappear, get it? John has been troubled for some time. He used to spy on Kathy when they were in college, and his father's habit of calling the chubby boy "Jiggling John" apparently wounded him. All of this is awkwardly uncovered through a pretentious structure that cannot disguise the fact that there is no story here. Sinks like a stone.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1994
ISBN: 061870986X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1994
Three quick, enjoyable reads to get you in a murderous Christmas spirit.
Three familiar sleuths each get a turn in this trio of cozy Christmas mysteries.
First, O’Connor (Murder in Galway, 2019, etc.) dives into Siobhán O’Sullivan’s past. Just graduated from the Garda College and not due to report for duty until the New Year, she’s busy preparing for Christmas when she sees a sign advertising a missing dog and links the disappearance to that of her own family dog and others around town. When the town Santy, Paddy O’Shea, is discovered floating dead in a dunk tank he’s filled with hot chocolate, all the missing dogs are also found, waiting in vain to be part of his extravagant show. Now Siobhán must help catch Santy's killer. Next up, Day (Strangled Eggs and Ham, 2019, etc.) presents South Lick, Indiana, cafe/country store owner Robbie Jordan, whose boyfriend Abe’s father, Howard O’Neill, has secretly acquired Cocoa, a rescued Lab puppy, as a Christmas gift for Abe’s son, Sean. When Howard’s business associate, Jed Greenberg, is found dead on an icy sidewalk, tangled in Cocoa’s leash, it turns out to be murder. Though Jed had plenty of enemies, Howard is a particularly choice suspect because he’d just learned that Jed had cheated him in a business deal. In the final tale, Erickson (Death by Café Mocha, 2019, etc.) features cafe/bookstore owner Krissy Hancock, a locally renowned sleuth who reluctantly accompanies her friend Rita Jablonski to a remote warehouse, where Lewis Coates, whose attention to detail is obsessive, has installed an escape room. Each member of the small group is given their own room whose door code they must determine from cryptic clues. They all manage to escape to a large locked room where they find the corpse of Coates. A prick Krissy finds on his finger and traces to a trick mug strongly suggests that one of the players is also a killer.
Three quick, enjoyable reads to get you in a murderous Christmas spirit.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4967-2360-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Kensington
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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