by Karin Fossum & translated by Charlotte Barslund ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 1, 2010
A chamber play for two characters whose moralizing is amplified by a running debate over the nature of fiction and its...
The creator of Inspector Konrad Sejer (The Water’s Edge, 2009, etc.) constructs a simple, excruciating test of an unassuming hero’s claim to be a good person.
The book's arresting first chapter introduces a female author whose characters come to life. Alvar Eide, whom we meet as the story opens, has always thought of himself as a good person. Even before he’s named Alvar Eide by the author whose attention he solicits, he offers due apologies for jumping to the head of the line among her imaginary offspring, ahead of the woman with the dead child whose story the author has been planning to tell. When he succeeds in getting the author to create a story for him, Alvar is happy that she’s retained his conscientious work ethic and regular habits. He lives alone in an upstairs flat near the Gallery Krantz, where he works as a salesperson. But Alvar, who continues to interrupt the initially placid narrative with return visits to his author, is uneasy. He fears the dramatic complications that he knows must follow if his story is to be a story at all. Given his formative childhood memory of his parents’ refusal to offer help to the victims of a horrifying accident, he doesn’t want his untried virtue to be tested. Yet, as his author points out, his story, once begun, must take on a life of its own, and when a teenaged drug addict comes into the gallery to get out of the cold, he can’t help giving her a cup of coffee to warm her up. This gesture sets him on the road to ever deeper involvement with a girl of whom he knows nothing but her vulnerability, her greed and her ability to manipulate him by playing on his claim to be a good person.
A chamber play for two characters whose moralizing is amplified by a running debate over the nature of fiction and its vicissitudes. The result is slender but haunting.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-15-101366-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: June 2, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2010
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by Karin Fossum ; translated by Kari Dickson
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by Karin Fossum
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by Karin Fossum ; translated by Kari Dickson
by Lisa Jewell ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 24, 2018
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.
Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.
Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s (I Found You, 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5464-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
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by Lisa Jewell
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by Lisa Jewell
by J.A. Jance ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 2, 2019
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
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New York Times Bestseller
A convicted killer’s list of five people he wants dead runs the gamut from the wife he’s already had murdered to franchise heroine Ali Reynolds.
Back in the day, women came from all over to consult Santa Clarita fertility specialist Dr. Edward Gilchrist. Many of them left his care happily pregnant, never dreaming that the father of the babies they carried was none other than the physician himself, who donated his own sperm rather than that of the handsome, athletic, disease-free men pictured in his scrapbook. When Alexandra Munsey’s son, Evan, is laid low by the kidney disease he’s inherited from his biological father and she returns to Gilchrist in search of the donor’s medical records, the roof begins to fall in on him. By the time it’s done falling, he’s serving a life sentence in Folsom Prison for commissioning the death of his wife, Dawn, the former nurse and sometime egg donor who’d turned on him. With nothing left to lose, Gilchrist tattoos himself with the initials of five people he blames for his fall: Dawn; Leo Manuel Aurelio, the hit man he’d hired to dispose of her; Kaitlyn Todd, the nurse/receptionist who took Dawn’s place; Alex Munsey, whose search for records upset his apple cart; and Ali Reynolds, the TV reporter who’d helped put Alex in touch with the dozen other women who formed the Progeny Project because their children looked just like hers. No matter that Ali’s been out of both California and the news business for years; Gilchrist and his enablers know that revenge can’t possibly be served too cold. Wonder how far down that list they’ll get before Ali, aided once more by Frigg, the methodical but loose-cannon AI first introduced in Duel to the Death (2018), turns on them?
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how little the boundary-challenged AI, who gets into the case more or less inadvertently, differs from your standard human sidekick with issues.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5101-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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