A captivating tale that artfully explicates a strange profession.
A commercial jingle composer is framed for murder and becomes the target of repeated assassination attempts in Levine’s novel.
In 1979, Ernie Lanier and Annie Sands have been together for nearly a decade. He was once the lead singer and bass player for a band called Generation Gap that rose to prominence in the 1960s, in part for its fierce opposition to the Vietnam War; she was in The Love Notes, a popular band that had one of its singles top the charts for months in 1962. Now, they’re firmly entrenched in the establishment they once so stridently opposed, writing and performing commercial jingles, and doing well enough to afford a garden apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side—a delicious irony in a book brimming with them. (Ernie wrote the jingle for a Clio-winning commercial selling dandruff shampoo, solidifying his place in the industry after only three years working in it.) One day, Ernie engages in an acrimonious argument with Harold Gordell, music director for ad agency Picknitter and Ogrely, an imperious man with more power than social grace. Shortly after, Harold is discovered dead, shot in his own office and clutching Ernie’s music in his hand. Unsurprisingly, Det. Lloyd Raymond is quickly convinced Ernie is the culprit; Ernie is just as quickly convinced he is being framed, a suspicion confirmed when he realizes someone broke into his home and left behind a picture (of Harold and Richard Nixon) stolen from Harold’s office. Later, Ernie is violently mugged on the street, and the perpetrator shoves the gun used to kill Harold into his pocket. The good news is that Raymond now comes to believe Ernie; the bad news is that, after failing to frame him, Harold’s murderer now turns his attentions to killing Ernie as well.
Levine paints an extraordinary picture of the commercial jingle world, an industry whose silliness (some of the jingle lyrics provided are hilariously banal) is belied by the savage nature of its competitiveness. As Annie sardonically puts it, “Wonderful business, isn’t it?” The deeper Ernie digs into the identity of his would-be killer, the more he is reminded of how volatile his profession is, riven by rivalry and massive financial stakes and rife with hard drugs. The author is guilty of some minor literary missteps, specifically some corny prose. When Ernie realizes his and Annie’s lives are in peril, he commits to finding his assassin, and his resolve is expressed with cinematic melodrama: “Whoever this motherfucker is, he doesn’t just have the cops to deal with. He’s got me.” Additionally, the conclusion of the story is so formulaic that it renders the climax disappointingly anticlimactic, though it’s intended to be an electrifying crescendo. Still, none of these flaws fatally undermines the narrative, which is worth the price of admission for its striking portrayal of a genuinely peculiar industry, one which permeates our lives but likely remains a mystery to most. This is an endlessly entertaining novel—funny, edifying, and immersive.
A captivating tale that artfully explicates a strange profession.Pub Date: April 5, 2024
ISBN: 9798218383657
Page Count: 197
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.
Stockett heads to Mississippi for another historical novel about feisty women.
This time, perhaps recalling criticisms of cultural appropriation in The Help (2009), she sticks to feisty white women, with one exception. The setting is Oxford in 1933. For two miserable years, 11-year-old Meg has lived in “the Orphan,” a county asylum for parentless girls. Chairlady Garnett—a villain so one-note she’d twirl a mustache if she had one—makes it her mission to ostracize the older girls she deems unadoptable, stigmatizing them as offspring of the “feebleminded” mothers who abandoned them. She particularly has it in for smart, sassy Meg, who refuses to believe her mother’s mysterious disappearance was deliberate. Elsewhere in Oxford, Birdie Calhoun comes to visit her sister Frances, who married a wealthy banker, to ask for money on behalf of their mother and grandmother back in Footely. Frances isn’t thrilled by this reminder of her impoverished small-town origins. But she’s trying to climb up in Oxford society by volunteering at the Orphan, the asylum’s books need to be done before the state inspector shows up in a few weeks, and Birdie is a bookkeeper. Having neatly arranged to keep Birdie in town and draw these two storylines together, Stockett goes on to spin a compulsively readable yarn with enough plot for a half-dozen novels. Birdie and Meg become friends, Meg is adopted despite Garnett’s best efforts, Meg’s mother turns up at the Orphan demanding to know where her child is—and that’s less than a quarter of the way through a long, winding narrative that keeps piling on more dramatic developments until all loose ends are neatly, if hastily, wrapped up in the final pages. Stockett might be making a point about Southern women facing facts and standing up for themselves, but mostly this is just a satisfyingly twisty tale that should make a great miniseries.
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9781954118812
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
An evocative and moving tribute to the death-defying, heart-opening, infinitely redemptive power of storytelling.
A chance meeting in a museum unlocks a long-closed door in a family’s past.
Of a piece with her last three novels—Commonwealth (2016), The Dutch House (2019), and Tom Lake (2023)—Patchett’s latest explores the evolution of families over time, romantic secrets, and step-relationships, again giving these topics the wry and tender treatment that is distinctively hers. As it begins, Daphne Fuller’s attentive husband, Jonathan, notices that a man has been following them through the Metropolitan Museum of Art. At first they chalk it up to the fact that “old guys love [Daphne],” as she told Jonathan decades ago, a notion he has held onto "like a souvenir postcard from another era." But it turns out that, though Daphne doesn’t recognize him, Eddie Triplett is her former stepfather. Like the author herself, as recalled in her 2020 essay “Three Fathers,” Daphne has had three dads. Her biological father, a deep-sea fisherman named Buddy Zabriskie, left the family early; her current stepfather, Lucas Ekker, lives with her mother in retirement in Massachusetts. Ekker is an unprepossessing sort Abby met working as the publicist for his self-help books, Positivity!, Positively Positive!, The Positivity Workbook!, Positive Every Day!, ad infinitum. The man in the museum, Eddie Triplett, was also someone her mother met through her job in publishing, and once Daphne realizes who he is, she remembers that “[their] hearts were forever stitched together.” This is because Daphne and Eddie were in a serious car accident when she was 9 years old, after which her mother immediately divorced him and evicted him from their lives. The details of that accident—among them lies the reason the novel is named after a horse called Whistler—are gradually wheedled out of Daphne by her younger sister, Leda, a clinical psychologist in New York and a reliable source of insight on the narrative’s key issues. “‘You make it sound like I’ve been keeping all this from you, but I’m not,’ [Daphne] said. ‘Who goes through life thinking about what happened when they were nine?’ ‘It’s all people think about,’ Leda said.”
An evocative and moving tribute to the death-defying, heart-opening, infinitely redemptive power of storytelling.Pub Date: June 2, 2026
ISBN: 9780063511637
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 6, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2026
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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