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
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.
“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-55634-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
PROFILES
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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