SYDNEY NOIR

Name: SYDNEY NOIR
Author: John Dale
ISBN: 978-1-61775-587-0

edited by John Dale ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 2019

Although Dale’s approach is traditional, the stories he’s assembled offer ample variety in this cavalcade of crime Down...

bookshelf

The former British penal colony provides fertile ground for dark doings, as these 14 tales demonstrate.

These stories tend to focus on actual crimes rather than on the poverty, misfortune, and deprivation that are often noir staples. Of course, Dale showcases some peeks at the low life. There’s a smattering of drug capers like Peter Doyle’s “Good Bloke” and Tom Gilling’s “Rip-Off,” and Leigh Redhead shows an exotic dancer taking a lap dance a little too far in “The Transmutation of Sex.” But even folks from Sydney’s upper crust can get into the act, as Kristen Tranter shows in “The Passenger.” Talent is no proof against bad acts and actors, as a nationally ranked swimmer learns in Robert Drewe’s “The Razor,” an acclaimed architect finds out in Mark Dapin’s “In the Court of the Lion King,” and a budding designer discovers in Julie Koh’s “The Patternmaker.” In addition, any number of ordinary folks blunder their ways into wrongdoing. In Eleanor Limprecht’s “In the Dunes,” a single dad’s struggle to raise a teenage girl ends badly. And in editor Dale’s “Good Boy, Bad Girl,” a young woman with aspirations finds a sinister way to take care of her aging grandmother. The emphasis on crime stories lays the groundwork for some pretty neat surprises. Mandy Sayer’s “The Birthday Present” and P.M. Newton’s “Chinaman’s Beach” both pack a wallop in the crime-with-a-twist department.

Although Dale’s approach is traditional, the stories he’s assembled offer ample variety in this cavalcade of crime Down Under.

Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-61775-587-0

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Akashic

Review Posted Online: Oct. 14, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2018

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

bookshelf

SEASONS OF HER LIFE

by Fern Michaels ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 1, 1994

bookshelf

A fat pancake of a novel, the author's second hardcover production tells the life story of one Ruby Blue—from an abused childhood and youth, to years as wife of a Marine, personal liberation, life in the world of industry, and her golden years in a rural retreat. Throughout the career of Ruby Blue, monster men abound. There's Papa George in their Pennsylvania home, a slasher, smacker, and wife beater, who requires that his daughters repay him, in bucks, for the cost of raising them. Then there's Ruby's husband, Andrew (met in those WW II glory days in D.C.), who is heavy on the verbal abuse and generally amoral. Ruby's lifelong friend Dixie is regularly slugged mercilessly by husband Hugo. Ruby's longtime true love, Calvin, is a gentle soul, but his wife, Eva, is as lethal as the men; fortunately for Calvin, she lacks the biceps. Ruby weathers life with Andrew at Marine bases and puts up with his callous treatment of their two children, but after Andrew admits to having gambled away their son's college money she finally decamps to New Jersey. Ruby soldiers on with Dixie, and their kitchen cookie business goes international in no time. As for the men, they'll get theirs: Papa George is Bobbittized with scalding grape jelly; the late Hugo's ashes get lost in traffic; and Ruby dumps Calvin. But Andrew sees the light. Glop. However, bear in mind the author's smashing success in paperback, including her Texas saga (5 million sold).

Pub Date: April 1, 1994

ISBN: 0-345-36774-X

Page Count: 528

Publisher: Ballantine

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1994

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE BLOSSOM SISTERS
by Fern Michaels

- BOOK REVIEW
BREAKING NEWS
by Fern Michaels

- BOOK REVIEW
SWEET REVENGE
by Fern Michaels

bookshelf

TREE OF SMOKE

by Denis Johnson ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 2007

It’s more than coincidence that the novel features two sets of relatives whose blood ties are once removed, for the family...

bookshelf

Within the current political climate, the reader might expect a new novel about the war in Vietnam to provide a metaphor for Iraq. Yet Denis Johnson has bigger whales to land in his longest and most ambitious work to date. Tree of Smoke is less concerned with any individual war than with the nature of war, and with the essence of war novels. There are echoes here of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (particularly as transformed by Francis Ford Coppola into Apocalypse Now) and Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, yet Johnson’s achievement suggests that each generation gets the war—and the war novel—it deserves.

At the center of Johnson’s epic sprawl is Colonel Francis Sands, the novel’s Captain Ahab, a character of profound, obsessive complexity and contradiction. Is he visionary or madman, patriot or traitor? Dead or alive? Or, somehow, all of the above? Because the reader perceives the Colonel (as he is reverently known) through the eyes of other characters, he shimmers like a kaleidoscope of shifting impressions. His military involvement in Asia preceded Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, and he has continued to operate as a CIA agent within the shadows of Vietnam, while perhaps answering to no authority higher than his own.
From World War II through the war in Vietnam, much has changed—allegiances and alliances, public sentiment, the modes of modern warfare. Yet the Colonel hasn’t—he won’t or he can’t. Though he is plainly the novel’s pivotal figure, Johnson spends more time inside the psyche of the Colonel’s nephew, William “Skip” Sands, whose father died in action and whose enlistment extends a family tradition. He’s as naïve as the Colonel is worldly, as filled with self-doubt as his uncle is free of it, but he ultimately joins his relative in psychological operations against the enemy—whomever that may be. Eventually, he must decide whether it is possible to serve both his legendary relative and his country.
A less engaging subplot concerns half-brothers Bill and James Houston, who enter the war as teenagers to escape their dead-end lives in Arizona. Where the Sands family operates on the periphery of the war, the Houstons are deep in the muck of it. Though they are what once might have been called cannon fodder, the war gives their lives definition and a sense of mission, of destiny, that is missing back home—which will never again feel like home after Vietnam.

It’s more than coincidence that the novel features two sets of relatives whose blood ties are once removed, for the family that one chooses is ultimately more important than the family into which one happens to be born. Thus it is all the more imperative to choose wisely—and all the more difficult, given the duplicity that the war seems to require for self-preservation. As the novel obliterates all distinctions between good and evil, allies and enemies, loyalty and betrayal, it sustains the suspense of who will survive long enough to have the last word.