Skip the skimpy appetizers and head straight for the main course. Even at novella length, Beck (The Revenge of Kali-Ra,...
Stanford coed Iris Cooper has a knack for solving mysteries. Right from the title story, in which she helps her aunt Hermione’s lawyer, Mr. Musselwhite, identify Edna Spencer’s rightful heir, she focuses instinctively on the single clue that reveals all. That’s how she manages to solve the murder of starlet Blanche Talbot in “Hollywood Homicide” and the theft of Ursula Destinoy-Pinchot’s pearls in “A Romance in the Rockies.” But “Peril Under the Palms,” a novella originally published separately in 1989, comprises two-thirds of this volume of reprints and offers a trickier kind of case. At first it seems as if spinster Viola Blodgett has simply been conked by a coconut while sitting under a palm tree on vacation in Hawaii. But Iris, who’d heard Miss Blodgett warn of the dangers lurking beneath palms only the day before, suspects foul play. Poking around, she discovers a slew of suspects: handsome Kimo Kawena, the gigolo who was teaching Miss Blodgett to surf; her paid companion, Miss Pomfret, who felt threatened by Kimo’s attentions; even Iris’s schoolmate Antoinette Caulfield’s grandmother, who had felt the lash of Miss Blodgett’s acid tongue over the bridge table. But when shady Mrs. Montesquieu, who’s been stalking Antoinette, also turns up dead, it takes all of Iris’s ingenuity—and the legwork of her boyfriend, newshound Jack Clancy—to unmask a fiendish killer.
Skip the skimpy appetizers and head straight for the main course. Even at novella length, Beck (The Revenge of Kali-Ra, 1999, etc.) is as funny and ingenious as anyone out there.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-7862-4570-0
Page Count: 283
Publisher: Five Star/Gale Cengage
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2002
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It's being called a novel, but it is more a hybrid: short-stories/essays/confessions about the Vietnam War—the subject that O'Brien reasonably comes back to with every book. Some of these stories/memoirs are very good in their starkness and factualness: the title piece, about what a foot soldier actually has on him (weights included) at any given time, lends a palpability that makes the emotional freight (fear, horror, guilt) correspond superbly. Maybe the most moving piece here is "On The Rainy River," about a draftee's ambivalence about going, and how he decided to go: "I would go to war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to." But so much else is so structurally coy that real effects are muted and disadvantaged: O'Brien is writing a book more about earnestness than about war, and the peekaboos of this isn't really me but of course it truly is serve no true purpose. They make this an annoyingly arty book, hiding more than not behind Hemingwayesque time-signatures and puerile repetitions about war (and memory and everything else, for that matter) being hell and heaven both. A disappointment.
Pub Date: March 28, 1990
ISBN: 0618706410
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990
SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
As Tolkien had his Silmarillion, so Martin has this trilogy of foundational tales. They succeed on their own, but in...
Huzzah! Martin (The Ice Dragon, 2014, etc.) delivers just what fans have been waiting for: stirring tales of the founding of the Targaryen line.
Duncan—Dunk for short—has his hapless moments. He’s big, nearly gigantic, “hugely tall for his age, a shambling, shaggy, big-boned boy of sixteen or seventeen.” Uncertain of himself, clumsy, and alone in the world, he has every one of the makings of a hero, if only events will turn in that direction. They do, courtesy of a tiny boy who steals into the “hedge knight” Dunk’s life and eventually reveals a name to match that of Ser Duncan the Tall—an altogether better name, at that, than Duncan of Flea Bottom would have been. Egg, as the squire calls himself, has a strange light about him, as if he will be destined to go on to better things, as indeed he will. Reminiscent of a simpler Arthur Rackham, the illustrations capture that light, as they do the growing friendship between Dunk and Egg—think Manute Bol and Muggsy Bogues, if your knowledge of basketball matches your interest in fantasy. This being Martin, that friendship will not be without its fraught moments, its dangers and double crosses and knightly politics. There are plenty of goopily violent episodes as well, from jousts (“this time Lord Leo Tyrell aimed his point so expertly he ripped the Grey Lion’s helm cleanly off his head”) to medieval torture (“Egg…used the hat to fan away the flies. There were hundreds crawling on the dead men, and more drifting lazily through the still, hot air.”). Throughout, Martin delivers thoughtful foreshadowing of the themes and lineages that will populate his Ice and Fire series, in which Egg, it turns out, is much less fragile than he seems.
As Tolkien had his Silmarillion, so Martin has this trilogy of foundational tales. They succeed on their own, but in addition, they succeed in making fans want more—and with luck, Martin will oblige them with more of these early yarns.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-345-53348-7
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: Oct. 6, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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