A quirky debut that ultimately falls flat.
An attempted patricide goes awry in Starkey’s debut novel of suspense and family ties.
On Dec. 31, 2010, 83-year-old Winston Brickley, the third-richest man in South Carolina, is recovering from heart surgery. Because of the Economic Growth and Tax Reconciliation Act of 2001, the federal estate tax isn’t in effect yet, but new rates will begin the next day. Winston’s hapless son Richard, seeking a huge tax break, concocts a plan to dispose of his father before midnight, with his sister Michelle as a reluctant accomplice. Winston finds out about the plan and turns to his grandson Brett for help. The story starts as a tongue-in-cheek thriller, but lengthy flashbacks to years past distract from the main plot. The novel also focuses on Winston’s son-in-law Lee Brenner, who obsessively reads novels and shirks his work and his wife—to the degree that a therapist creates a new disorder diagnosis just for him. Starkey details the breakup of Brenner’s marriage and career, whose unrealistic solutions to his problems are amusing. However, they’re not as intriguing as Winston’s spry attempts to escape his son’s murder plans. Other characters, such as grifter Harry Shigler, Brett’s school friends and Richard’s wife, flit in and out of the story without making a significant impact. The author tells the story from different characters’ perspectives in an attempt to give each of them discernible personalities, but this breaks the story into far too many chapters. It sometimes confusingly switches between third person and first person, and grows increasingly unfocused as it progresses. Most of the time, however, the matter-of-fact prose is clear, if not particularly memorable.
A quirky debut that ultimately falls flat.Pub Date: March 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-1494471040
Page Count: 336
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.
Pub Date: April 5, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-41224-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
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