The shaggy mystery, which requires an even more hyperextended finale than The Burglar in the Library (1997), manages to...
If you catch the allusion in Block’s title, you’re in just the right mood for Bernie Rhodenbarr’s ninth spot of burglary-cum-detection. Alice Cottrell, a former teen prodigy who spent three of her Wonder years with Gulliver Fairborn, the famously reclusive American writer whose first novel changed the life of every teenager who read it, has hired Bernie to steal Gully’s letters to Anthea Landau – the ex-agent who’s about to put them up for auction even though Gully copyrighted them – so that Alice can protect her old mentor by destroying them. Bernie checks into Anthea’s hotel (the seedy, genteel, splendidly evoked Paddington) breaks sedately into her room, and begins his search for the letters. But he has to leave half a step ahead of the law when he realizes that the reason Anthea isn’t listening to his burglarious noises is that she’s dead and the cops are knocking. Except for the corpse, this may sound as familiar as last week’s literary gossip, but when Bernie stops to purloin a ruby necklace from another Paddington guestroom he passes through during his escape, he opens a whole new can of worms and unleashes a comic nightmare of collectors, scholars, spurned lovers, and garden-variety thieves.
The shaggy mystery, which requires an even more hyperextended finale than The Burglar in the Library (1997), manages to honor most of the conventions of the formal detective story even while sending them all giddily up. And if Bernie Rhodenbarr weren’t already irresistible, the Salinger/Maynard tie-in would hook the stragglers.Pub Date: July 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-525-94500-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Her zany cast will have readers wondering whether DiRico’s series debut is set in Belle View or Bellevue.
Murder crashes the party.
Mia Carina would like nothing better than to see her dad, Ravello, a made man in Donny Boldano’s mob, go straight. When she hears he’s won the Belle View Banquet Manor from hard-luck gambler Andre Bouras in a poker game, she rushes back from Palm Beach to help him run the place, hoping it will provide her dad with enough legitimate income to allow him to cut his ties with the underworld. Despite its dated décor and bone-shaking proximity to LaGuardia Airport, the catering hall has panoramic views out its windows that make it a worthy rival to the overpriced event venues in Manhattan—which Mia’s outer-borough friends drive her nuts by calling “the city.” (“Queens is the city” is her perennial retort.) And she proves her borough cred by moving in with her nonna in Astoria. But running a catering hall involves more than dealing with bridezillas like Alice Paluski, who’s determined to make her wedding bigger and better than her twin sister’s, or with momzillas like Barbara Grazio, Alice’s prospective mother-in-law, who’s determined to make the groom’s side of the wedding outshine the bride’s. She has to wrangle an ever changing cast of chefs, sous-chefs, waitstaff, decorators, DJs, and the occasional stripper, who all bring a host of quirks and baggage to the banquet table. She also has to deal with more than one corpse. It takes all of Mia’s considerable ingenuity to keep Ravello’s first legit enterprise from becoming a ticket right back to the slammer.
Her zany cast will have readers wondering whether DiRico’s series debut is set in Belle View or Bellevue.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-4967-2534-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Kensington
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Perfect for readers who wish To Kill a Mockingbird had been presented from a slightly older, male point of view.
Eskens’ latest novel is a warmhearted story of a white teenager's awakening to the racial tensions that run through his Missouri town in 1976.
Years before he’ll become a successful attorney (The Shadows We Hide, 2018, etc.), Boady Sanden struggles to navigate all the usual high school ordeals in small-town Jessup, including boring subjects and bullying by the likes of all-state wrestler and prom king Jarvis Halcomb. In Boady’s case, these everyday problems are aggravated by his outsider status as a non-Catholic freshman at St. Ignatius High School, his home life with his widowed, introverted mother, Emma, and, most recently, the arrival of some new neighbors, the Elgins. Charles Elgin is definitely an improvement on indolent Cecil Halcomb, Jarvis' father, whom he replaces as manager of the local manufacturing plant after bookkeeper Lida Poe disappears with more than $100,000 of the plant’s money. Jenna Elgin is excellent company for Emma Sanden, whom she helps draw out of her shell. And after a comically unfortunate first encounter, Boady quickly takes to their son, Thomas, who’s exactly his age. But the Elgins, like Lida Poe, are African American, and the combination of an unsolved embezzlement, good old boy Cecil’s displacement by an outsider, and the town’s incipient racism works slowly but inexorably to put Boady, recruited by the Crusaders of Racial Purity and Strength, under pressure to betray his new friendship. Declining to join the racists but repeatedly running away rather than refusing their demands point blank, Boady must navigate a perilous route to supporting his community and claiming his own adult identity.
Perfect for readers who wish To Kill a Mockingbird had been presented from a slightly older, male point of view.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-316-50972-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Mulholland Books/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2019
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