One of the Windy City's best-kept secrets, Peterson (Twilight of the Idiots, 2015, etc.) looks to grab attention with this...
In Peterson's short, sharp, offbeat novel, Chicago private detective Art Topp drifts between faulty memories of his happy marriage and the blank state he finds himself in five years after his wife was found riddled with bullets in his office.
In his mind, Adeleine, a child of the wealthy suburb of Winnetka, was the perfect wife, even if she did rail at him for being lazy, untruthful, and irresponsible for starting up a detective agency after losing his job at a telecom company. Now in a contentious long-term relationship with Rita, whose mother died the same day Adeleine did—Topp met her at the cemetery on the day of the two funerals—he still has regular visitations from his late wife. He hardly has any clients to boast of—most of the calls to his Triple A Detective AAAgency are from people thinking they dialed Triple AAA Plumbers. He spends a lot of his time at the shooting gallery with his jobless friend Cal, whose main contribution to their relationship is to urge the underperforming Topp to get rid of his Ruger .22 and use a vintage UZI carbine like his. Filled with terse, rat-a-tat exchanges ("When were we in love?" "Were we ever in love?" "Love"), the book is less a work of crime fiction than a stark meditation on grief, Catholic guilt, and guns. Peterson is cagey in the way he makes his absurdist setups pay off emotionally. Employing a circular narrative in which the present is never more than arm's length from the past, he overcomes considerable obstacles in making you care about its hapless protagonist.
One of the Windy City's best-kept secrets, Peterson (Twilight of the Idiots, 2015, etc.) looks to grab attention with this skillfully calibrated, oddly compelling novel about a grieving detective.Pub Date: Dec. 15, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9986325-6-8
Page Count: 222
Publisher: Tortoise Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 9, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2017
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
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