A familiar but action-packed whodunit.
A bar owner takes on the role of detective in the first installment of Kirsch’s (The Big Job, 2018, etc.) new mystery series.
Janet Black is the proprietor of a friendly neighborhood bar in Knoxville, Tennessee, called the Spot. She loves the place, but she finds that managing it presents some challenges; for example, it appears that one of her employees has been stealing from the register, and she’s focused on finding the culprit. Then one day, she discovers a dead body behind the bar. It’s Ike Freeman, a formerly troublesome regular. The police attempt to pin the murder on Janet’s sexy boyfriend, Jason, a security expert with a juvenile criminal record for computer hacking. To clear his name, Janet decides to do a little digging on her own. It also turns out that Ike had a rough past in which he left a trail of destruction. Then one of Janet’s employees, who likely has knowledge of the crime, disappears—and so does Jason. She later finds evidence of police corruption, and when another body turns up in the bar, Janet escalates the investigation further; she eventually gets all the suspects together in one room—a move reminiscent of Agatha’s Christie’s legendary detective Hercule Poirot. Kirsch’s witty whodunit includes plenty of red herrings and a long list of potential suspects with plausible reasons to commit murder. The protagonist, a minor character from the author’s Stella Reynolds series, is a little rough around the edges, but readers will find her to be likable enough to carry her own story. She’s sharp, she swears, and she’s not always right, but she does everything with an appealing sense of humor. This novel doesn’t break any new ground; it’s a light, cozy mystery with a charismatic female lead and a quirky cast of characters, including a handsome love interest in the background. However, it’s excellent escapist entertainment.
A familiar but action-packed whodunit.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9969350-8-1
Page Count: 246
Publisher: Sunnyside Press
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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