Bobby Blasco was a star athlete in high school and went on to still greater success in pro baseball—even had a brief but remarkable stint in the majors—but he never had so many fans as now, when he's been found in an alley with his head bashed in by a Ted Williamsmodel Louisville Slugger. Bobby's latest girlfriend, Elaine Donatello, whose Protection From Abuse order against him had only goaded him to new heights of crass ingenuity, will finally be able to sleep through the night; so will his two ex-wives, who'd gotten PFA's of their own without having much protection to show for it. Even his former catcher, Rocksburg Gazette reporter Joe Barone, is eager to tell Acting Police Chief Rugs Carlucci what a monster Bobby B was. With the town practically ready to schedule a parade in lieu of Bobby's obsequies, there's no great urgency about tracking down his killer, and Carlucci can turn his attention to the really important things—like whether blandly scheming mayor Angelo Bellotti will ever appoint a new police chief, and whether Carlucci's demented mother will ever get off his case, and whether he'll ever find true love. Fans of Constantine's long-running Rocksburg saga (Family Values, 1997, etc.) will be pleased to see that even in this lesser entry, Carlucci not only solves the homicide—courtesy of an attorney who obligingly confesses on behalf of his client—but makes progress on those larger problems too.
Pub Date: March 12, 1998
ISBN: 0-89296-646-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1998
Prime candidate for a TV movie.
A romance/investigation debut novel set firmly in the spiritual aftermath of WWI.
Maisie Dobbs, recently turned private investigator in 1929 England, had been a nurse back during the war to end all wars, so she knows about wounds—both those to the body and those to the soul. It’s just a month after she sets up shop that she gets her first interesting case: What initially looks like just another infidelity matter turns out to be a woman’s preoccupation with a dead man, Vincent Weathershaw, in a graveyard. Flashback to Maisie’s upbringing: her transition from servant class to the intellectual class when she shows interest in the works of Hume, Kierkegaard, and Jung. She doesn’t really get to explore her girlhood until she makes some roughshod friends in the all-woman ambulance corps that serves in France, and she of course falls for a soldier, Simon, who writes her letters but then disappears. Now, in 1929, Maisie’s investigation into Vincent Weathershaw leads her to the mysterious Retreat, run like a mix between a barracks and a monastery, where soldiers still traumatized by the war go to recover. Maisie knows that her curiosity just might get her into trouble—yet she trusts her instincts and sends an undercover assistant into the Retreat in the hopes of finding out more about Vincent. But what will happen, she worries, if one needs to retreat from the Retreat? Will she discover the mystery behind her client’s wife’s preoccupation with a man who spent time there? And by any chance, albeit slight, might she encounter that old lover who disappeared back in 1917 and who she worried might be dead? Winspear rarely attempts to elevate her prose past the common romance, and what might have been a journey through a strata of England between the wars is instead just simple, convenient and contrived.
Prime candidate for a TV movie.Pub Date: July 1, 2003
ISBN: 1-56947-330-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Soho
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2003
BOOK TO SCREEN
A quick, fun read. Rowling delivers a set of characters every bit as durable as her Potter people and a story that, though...
Murderous muggles are up to no good, and it’s up to a seemingly unlikely hero to set things right.
The big news surrounding this pleasing procedural is that Galbraith, reputed former military policeman and security expert, is none other than J.K. Rowling, who presumably has no experience on the Afghan front or at Scotland Yard. Why the pseudonymous subterfuge? We may never know. What’s clear, and what matters, is that Galbraith/Rowling’s yarn is an expertly written exercise in both crime and social criticism of a piece with Rowling’s grown-up novel The Casual Vacancy (2012), even if her hero, private detective Cormoran Strike, bears a name that wouldn’t be out of place in her Harry Potter series. Strike is a hard-drinking, hard-bitten, lonely mess of a man, for reasons that Rowling reveals bit by bit, carefully revealing the secrets he keeps about his parentage, his time in battle and his bad luck. Strike is no Sherlock Holmes, but he’s a dogged pursuer of The Truth, in this instance the identity of the person who may or may not have relieved a supermodel of her existence most unpleasantly: “Her head had bled a little into the snow. The face was crushed and swollen, one eye reduced to a pucker, the other showing as a sliver of dull white between distended lids.” It’s an icky image, but no ickier than Rowling’s roundup of sinister, self-serving, sycophantic characters who inhabit the world of high fashion, among the most suspicious of them a fellow who’s—well, changed his name to pull something over on his audience (“It’s a long fucking way from Hackney, I can tell you...”). Helping Strike along as he turns over stones in the yards of the rich and famous is the eminently helpful Robin Ellacott, newcomer to London and determined to do better than work as a mere temp, which is what lands her at Strike’s door. The trope of rumpled detective and resourceful girl Friday is an old one, of course, but Rowling dusts it off and makes it new even as she turns London into a setting for her tale of mayhem as memorable as what Dashiell Hammett did with San Francisco in The Maltese Falcon.
A quick, fun read. Rowling delivers a set of characters every bit as durable as her Potter people and a story that, though no more complex than an Inspector Lewis episode, works well on every level.Pub Date: April 30, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-316-20684-6
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Mulholland Books/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2013
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