The crime story here, as Gruesser’s scholarly introduction acknowledges, is at once cluttered, transparent, and incomplete....
A fragment of historical importance, serialized in 1907–09 and now published for the first time in book form, pits a gifted young African detective against a covey of veteran jewel thieves.
Before he can join the ranks of the International Detective Agency, Sadipe Okukenu, a highly educated Yoruban, must first leave Nigeria for America in the company of a kindly but condescending sea captain who places him at his sister’s school in Maine. Winning a scholarship to a one-horse southern college satirically modeled on the Tuskegee Institute, Sadipe swiftly finds, as his friend General R.M. De Mortie tells him, that “the South is a veritable hell for a man of your culture and taste.” So Sadipe withdraws from the college and the region one step ahead of a lynch mob after he’s integrated a public conveyance half a century ahead of Rosa Parks and challenged a white missionary’s benighted view of the Dark Continent. In the considerably less interesting sequel, Sadipe, observant, ingratiating, and formidably articulate, rises on the general’s recommendation to a trusted position in the agency, and it’s no surprise—though it’s quite a coincidence—when he instantly divines that Col. Ewart George Evelyn Bradshawe and his plausible accomplices have their eye on a fabulous diamond Captain George De Forrest bought several years ago from Sadipe’s own brother. Showing skills for inference, guesswork, and especially disguise, Sadipe is hot on the trail of the conspirators when the story breaks off with Captain De Forrest’s diamond still unstolen.
The crime story here, as Gruesser’s scholarly introduction acknowledges, is at once cluttered, transparent, and incomplete. In his forerunner to Chester Himes’s ribald comedy and Walter Mosley’s somber odysseys of oppression, though, ex-slave Bruce (1856–1924) shows that although subtlety in representing heroes of color would come later, racial pride and eloquence were ready and waiting long ago.Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 1-55553-511-9
Page Count: 160
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
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
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...
An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.
Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.Pub Date: March 6, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-70376-4
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000
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