A richly textured, thoughtful whodunit with a moral bite.
The London Blitz makes an almost perfect coverup for murder in this labyrinthine mystery.
Diving out of a London townhouse after German bombs hit it during World War II, Rose Alyn looks back to see her cousin Rosalee racing for the door. She nearly makes it before a masked figure looms and clubs her to death. Motives abound. The newly minted widow of wealthy industrialist Claude van Arthur, Rosalee was gorgeous, selfish and cruel, an odious woman who made her servants give up their dairy rations for her milk bath. Plenty of relatives wanted her dead so they could get their hands on the van Arthur fortune, including a sister-in-law who pestered her with obscene phone calls and a brother-in-law who needed her cash to get out of an embezzlement charge. But a surprise will puts Rosalee and Claude’s entire estate in Rose’s hands. While she tries to solve the murder, she’s also in charge of administering the finances of the people who probably killed her cousin–and may try to kill her. This is a very British mystery–Rose and her Scotland Yard bodyguard Lucas spend lots of time in icily civil drawing-room interrogations, and the main occupation of most characters is the desperate jockeying for inheritances. Valberde tells the story at a luxuriant pace, and in building a sense of social milieu and physical setting, the author lingers over the niceties of trusts and estate planning and steeps readers in the details of country-house décor. The novel is also serious meditation on the corrupting power of beauty–as plain Rose takes over Rosalee’s position, the author makes her responsibility and usefulness a mirror image of her cousin’s glittering parasitism, a distinction that’s not lost on an RAF pilot Rose becomes entangled with. Valberde’s prose is subtle, perceptive and alive to psychological nuance. It turns an investigation of a woman’s death into a searching examination of her life.
A richly textured, thoughtful whodunit with a moral bite.Pub Date: March 24, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4259-8733-6
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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