A tenacious, well-constructed mystery/thriller.
A suspicious suicide has people in a small town accusing a doctor of murder in Mulkerin’s (The Ayatollah’s Suitcase, 2013) medical thriller.
When Maggie Lin is found dead from a gunshot to the head, Zoe Hedges tries to convince her pathologist husband, Mick, that her friend was killed by Dr. Vincent Brasco. The doctor, who runs the cancer center at Saint Anselm Hospital, had been seeing Maggie romantically. He’s also notorious for using excessive radiation treatments to generate more revenue, literally burning some of his patients. A witness puts Brasco’s car at the scene of the crime, but the hospital’s CEO seems intent on stopping Mick from performing an autopsy. Brasco then accosts the witness, which results in him being jailed and ultimately charged with murder. But his defense attorney blames someone else: Zoe, a hospice team leader who may have carried out a mercy killing. Mulkerin’s novel quickly establishes itself as a murder mystery, but the story isn’t concerned with gathering clues or accumulating suspects. Rather, it’s a story about appearances: The manner in which one presents evidence to others, it seems to say, is far more important than the evidence itself. In one of the novel’s best lines, for example, Mick explains the danger of the coroner’s announcing the death as a suicide: “The public pins its opinion on the first theory it hears.” This narrative approach gives the plot an intense edge; throughout most of the book, Mick can’t be sure whether his wife is guilty or not, and despite Brasco’s undeniably shady persona, his culpability is largely conjecture. The author focuses on curious, enigmatic elements at times, such as a strange tattoo on Maggie’s backside, but he amps up the suspense when Mick and Zoe receive threatening letters. He also offers engrossing secondary characters, such as Sergei, a radiologist with Asperger’s syndrome.
A tenacious, well-constructed mystery/thriller.Pub Date: May 24, 2014
ISBN: 978-1497332393
Page Count: 444
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: July 3, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
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BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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