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A DEATH IN HARLEM

Name: A DEATH IN HARLEM
Author: Karla F.C. Holloway
ISBN: 978-0-8101-4081-3

by Karla F.C. Holloway ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 15, 2019

Holloway brings her period, place, and people alive and provides as a bonus a most unexpected culprit.

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A beautiful young woman’s fatal fall (or was it a push?) through a hotel’s window provokes multiple investigations into all manner of secrets in New York’s African American community at the height of the Harlem Renaissance.

Called to the podium of the Ninth Annual Opportunity Awards Banquet to receive the prize for Creative Fiction for her short story “Sanctuary,” Olivia Frelon misses her cue because she’s lying in the street outside the Hotel Theresa, her body shattered by the fall. At first the officers of the 30th Precinct have little interest in her death. When they do act, it’s to arrest Vera Scott, Olivia’s dear friend, frequent hostess, and wife to Dr. Reynolds Scott, Olivia’s lover. Sadie Mathis, Vera’s maid, convinced that her employer could never have killed even such a treacherous friend, asks Officer Weldon Haynie Thomas to look into the case on his own. As he patiently explains to her, Weldon has no official standing to investigate; he’s not even a detective. But as “Harlem’s first colored policeman,” he surely has some standing in the community. Agreeing to do what he can, Weldon doesn’t know that wealthy, white entrepreneur Hughes Wellington, a frequent patron of the African American community, has already engaged private investigator Sanders Campbell to make inquiries of his own. The secrets that emerge, it turns out, are all about race: racial pride, racial identity, racial passing, and the problematic relations between a Harlem community yearning for self-expression and the white institutions determined to police it while keeping it at a safe distance. Slipping in and out of Weldon’s voice, retired Duke professor Holloway (Legal Fictions, 2014, etc.) handsomely demonstrates his self-effacing professional maxim: “If you wait, information will come get you.”

Holloway brings her period, place, and people alive and provides as a bonus a most unexpected culprit.

Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2019

ISBN: 978-0-8101-4081-3

Page Count: 248

Publisher: Northwestern Univ.

Review Posted Online: June 30, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019

Categories:

HISTORICAL FICTION | MYSTERY & DETECTIVE

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WE WERE THE LUCKY ONES

by Georgia Hunter ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 14, 2017

Too beholden to sentimentality and cliché, this novel fails to establish a uniquely realized perspective.

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Hunter’s debut novel tracks the experiences of her family members during the Holocaust.

Sol and Nechuma Kurc, wealthy, cultured Jews in Radom, Poland, are successful shop owners; they and their grown children live a comfortable lifestyle. But that lifestyle is no protection against the onslaught of the Holocaust, which eventually scatters the members of the Kurc family among several continents. Genek, the oldest son, is exiled with his wife to a Siberian gulag. Halina, youngest of all the children, works to protect her family alongside her resistance-fighter husband. Addy, middle child, a composer and engineer before the war breaks out, leaves Europe on one of the last passenger ships, ending up thousands of miles away. Then, too, there are Mila and Felicia, Jakob and Bella, each with their own share of struggles—pain endured, horrors witnessed. Hunter conducted extensive research after learning that her grandfather (Addy in the book) survived the Holocaust. The research shows: her novel is thorough and precise in its details. It’s less precise in its language, however, which frequently relies on cliché. “You’ll get only one shot at this,” Halina thinks, enacting a plan to save her husband. “Don’t botch it.” Later, Genek, confronting a routine bit of paperwork, must decide whether or not to hide his Jewishness. “That form is a deal breaker,” he tells himself. “It’s life and death.” And: “They are low, it seems, on good fortune. And something tells him they’ll need it.” Worse than these stale phrases, though, are the moments when Hunter’s writing is entirely inadequate for the subject matter at hand. Genek, describing the gulag, calls the nearest town “a total shitscape.” This is a low point for Hunter’s writing; elsewhere in the novel, it’s stronger. Still, the characters remain flat and unknowable, while the novel itself is predictable. At this point, more than half a century’s worth of fiction and film has been inspired by the Holocaust—a weighty and imposing tradition. Hunter, it seems, hasn’t been able to break free from her dependence on it.

Too beholden to sentimentality and cliché, this novel fails to establish a uniquely realized perspective.

Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2017

ISBN: 978-0-399-56308-9

Page Count: 416

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: Nov. 21, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2016

Categories:

RELIGIOUS FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION

- BOOK TO SCREEN
Hulu’s ‘We Were the Lucky Ones’ Adds To Cast

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A CONSPIRACY OF BONES

by Kathy Reichs ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 17, 2020

Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.

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Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.

A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”

Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.