Minor work from Hassler (The Staggerford Flood, 2002, etc.).
Hassler returns to his old stamping grounds of rural Minnesota in two novellas.
The first is set in Staggerford, more than familiar to Hassler fans, and concerns two long unsolved cases: a murder and a disappearance. It also features five different narrators, of whom the most significant is Grover, 81-year-old desk clerk at the town’s fleabag hotel. Much of the action unfolds in the hotel lobby, so Grover makes a good witness. Nine years before, Neddy Nicholls, a Chamber of Commerce functionary, had been shot dead in front of the movie theater; soon after, his wife Blanche had mysteriously disappeared. Now Blanche’s daughter Penny Jean is on her way home from California to unravel the mystery, and Blanche’s ex-husband George is looking for Penny Jean. The two come together in the lobby, where long-time resident Dusty, a simple-minded retired garbageman, has just claimed he killed Blanche. The facts of the two murders are established quite fast, in a vaudeville atmosphere that climaxes in the hospital where Dusty, stricken by a heart attack, is first baptized with motor oil by his preacher nephew Ollie, then smothered by George (the heavy). The romp is a bit too frantic, and the folksiness is overdone. The second novella is much more dour, unusual for the upbeat Hassler. It’s the story of W.D. Nestor, the title’s nephew, at age 72 looking back at his life. Raised on a prairie farm and frequently whipped by his mean-spirited father, W.D. became an angry man, never laughing or crying, and loving only his wife Lucille (though the love remained unspoken). The couple’s snowbound wedding night is the one bright spot in W.D.’s memories. Late in life, the turkey farmer becomes friendly with a small boy; there’s pathos here, but then, jarringly, the story skips ahead ten years, to W.D.’s fatal visit to his ancient aunt Nancy.
Minor work from Hassler (The Staggerford Flood, 2002, etc.).Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-452-28540-2
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Plume
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2004
It’s more than coincidence that the novel features two sets of relatives whose blood ties are once removed, for the family...
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.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-374-27912-7
Page Count: 624
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The romantic doings of the likable characters are more interesting than the mediocre mystery.
A bike shop owner and her book club pals keep solving mysteries in ways that somehow don’t endear them to the police (Murder on Cape Cod, 2018, etc.).
Mackenzie Almeida, the proprietor of Mac’s Bikes in the touristy Cape Cod town of Westham, is dating Tim Brunelle, the caring and handsome owner of an artisanal bakery, who wants to get married and start a family. That’s not something independent neat freak Mac is ready to do. She enjoys living in her tiny house with Belle, her talkative parrot, for company. When Mac and her best friend, Gin, come across the dead body of wealthy Beverly Ruchart outside Gin’s taffy shop, Mac’s romantic problems get put on the back burner, especially since Gin is a suspect. She and her date, Eli Tubin, the widower of Beverly’s daughter, had attended a party at Beverly’s home only the night before. Beverly seems to have died from a heart attack, but an autopsy finds that she was poisoned with antifreeze, some of which has been planted in Gin’s garage. Of course Mac and her cohorts at the book club can’t resist a little sleuthing. They uncover several other plausible suspects: Beverly’s ne’er-do-well grandson, Ron, his Russian girlfriend, and his long-absent father, who has a police record. Although Beverly could be generous, she had a sharp tongue that made her plenty of enemies. Her interest in genealogy and reuniting long-lost parents and children endeared her to Wesley Farnham, for whom she found a son, but not so much to Farnham’s daughter, who misses being an only child. Although Mac turns her findings over to the police, she still attracts the killer’s notice and ends up owing her life to Belle.
The romantic doings of the likable characters are more interesting than the mediocre mystery.Pub Date: March 31, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-4967-1508-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Kensington
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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