Versatile Monninger (Second Season, The Viper Tree, etc.) tries his hand at a serial killer loose on a college campus—with grisly, effective results. Okay, you've heard this one before. Mild-mannered George Denkin, obsessively associating sex and death ever since the childhood day he accidentally killed his hairdresser mother, has grown up, sort of, to the status of part-time student and admissions clerk at Colbin College in wintry New Hampshire. Over the summer he's kept the home fires burning by dressing up as a woman and taking a straightedged razor (a grooming aid now found exclusively in genre fiction) to another woman and a campus security officer; but now that school is back in session he's stalking freshperson Zelda Fitzgibbon, an aspiring vet who—still wrestling with the demons of her own childhood (a Halloween bogyman nobody believed)—is especially vulnerable to getting isolated and terrorized in her dormitory, in the woods, and in a barn where she works (shivery scenes every one). As Captain Len Barney and the remaining campus forces (including an avid canine) get a profile from convenient psychology prof Farley Simon, and as George marks time by torturing and scalping a hooker who's found a new use for Alka Seltzer and a fellow-boarder he's never cared for, two boys, Tony Corposaro and Jimmy Ryder, find a wooded secret cave furnished with scalps and corpses dating back as far as four years, and Jimmy begins to flip out. Yes, there'll be more gruesome killings before the curtain—and then a gratuitous, horrific coda cribbed from The Silence of the Lambs. Monninger sets up his Currier and Ives campus milieu and its denizens, from the prostitute to the college president, so efficiently and confidently that you're disappointed when he doesn't develop them; only Zelda and her nemesis stay in the memory. Still, the don't-look- behind-you plot is the genuine article—as is the unsparingly graphic detail.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1992
ISBN: 1-55611-307-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Donald Fine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1991
IN THE NEWS
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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