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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
A newcomer to watch: fresh, funny, and tough.
Seven stories, including a couple of prizewinners, from an exuberantly talented young Thai-American writer.
In the poignant title story, a young man accompanies his mother to Kok Lukmak, the last in the chain of Andaman Islands—where the two can behave like “farangs,” or foreigners, for once. It’s his last summer before college, her last before losing her eyesight. As he adjusts to his unsentimental mother’s acceptance of her fate, they make tentative steps toward the future. “Farangs,” included in Best New American Voices 2005 (p. 711), is about a flirtation between a Thai teenager who keeps a pet pig named Clint Eastwood and an American girl who wanders around in a bikini. His mother, who runs a motel after having been deserted by the boy’s American father, warns him about “bonking” one of the guests. “Draft Day” concerns a relieved but guilty young man whose father has bribed him out of the draft, and in “Don’t Let Me Die in This Place,” a bitter grandfather has moved from the States to Bangkok to live with his son, his Thai daughter-in-law, and two grandchildren. The grandfather’s grudging adjustment to the move and to his loss of autonomy (from a stroke) is accelerated by a visit to a carnival, where he urges the whole family into a game of bumper cars. The longest story, “Cockfighter,” is an astonishing coming-of-ager about feisty Ladda, 15, who watches as her father, once the best cockfighter in town, loses his status, money, and dignity to Little Jui, 16, a meth addict whose father is the local crime boss. Even Ladda is in danger, as Little Jui’s bodyguards try to abduct her. Her mother tells Ladda a family secret about her father’s failure of courage in fighting Big Jui to save his own sister’s honor. By the time Little Jui has had her father beaten and his ear cut off, Ladda has begun to realize how she must fend for herself.
A newcomer to watch: fresh, funny, and tough.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-8021-1788-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2004
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