Keen comedy redeems an overly congested—albeit, briskly paced—murder plot.
A debut novel offers a hard-boiled detective story, punched up with some witty repartee—and sexual tension—between investigative partners.
Helene Stoner, a young, troubled girl, turns up dead at the Port Authority Terminal in New York City, mysteriously murdered. Her estranged father, Harcourt T. Stoner, an affluent baron of business, recruits two private investigators, Jessica Horowitz and Matt Redman, to find the killer. Autopsy results reveal that Helene gave birth to a child, and Harcourt wants them to track the kid down as well, if he or she remains alive. Meanwhile, Redman, a computer security expert, helps the IRS determine the source of a corrosive virus running rampant through its technology. The pair uncover a connection between Helene and Estella Malkin, a psychologically unhinged contract killer, who unfortunately dies before she can disclose any useful information. But Horowitz and Redman discover that Estella had donated significant sums of money to a charitable organization called Helping Hand Home, which provides assistance to erstwhile prostitutes and wayward girls. This leads them to a cultish organization in New Hampshire run by a charismatic leader, whose mission in life seems to be to prey upon vulnerable young women. The two parallel stories—the murder of Helene and the virus decimating IRS computers—finally converge in an unpredictable twist. It’s remarkable how much is packed into what is essentially a novella, but the price of unpredictability is a plot riddled with convolution and implausibility. The banter between the two protagonists can be genuinely sharp and funny, highlighting the barely suppressed romantic magnetism. They form an unlikely pair—she’s a Jewish ex-cop and he’s a black military veteran—but their chemistry is palpable. The dialogue sometimes reads like a parody of old pulp fiction mysteries, overwritten and excessively cute: “ ‘Freeze,’ Boris snapped. Matt was still trying to look up her tank top. ‘Or do you vant to choin your spirit friend, Zimru?’ Boris’ face did not inspire chumminess. Neither did the gun in his hand. She froze.” The pace is unyielding, and the authors manage to turn grim topics—murder and the systematic exploitation of young women—into fodder for comedy. This is a fun, if uninspired, iteration of a shopworn genre.
Keen comedy redeems an overly congested—albeit, briskly paced—murder plot.Pub Date: March 8, 2016
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 225
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 13, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet...
Four Chicago sisters anchor a sharp, sly family story of feminine guile and guilt.
Newcomer Lombardo brews all seven deadly sins into a fun and brimming tale of an unapologetically bougie couple and their unruly daughters. In the opening scene, Liza Sorenson, daughter No. 3, flirts with a groomsman at her sister’s wedding. “There’s four of you?” he asked. “What’s that like?” Her retort: “It’s a vast hormonal hellscape. A marathon of instability and hair products.” Thus begins a story bristling with a particular kind of female intel. When Wendy, the oldest, sets her sights on a mate, she “made sure she left her mark throughout his house—soy milk in the fridge, box of tampons under the sink, surreptitious spritzes of her Bulgari musk on the sheets.” Turbulent Wendy is the novel’s best character, exuding a delectable bratty-ness. The parents—Marilyn, all pluck and busy optimism, and David, a genial family doctor—strike their offspring as impossibly happy. Lombardo levels this vision by interspersing chapters of the Sorenson parents’ early lean times with chapters about their daughters’ wobbly forays into adulthood. The central story unfurls over a single event-choked year, begun by Wendy, who unlatches a closed adoption and springs on her family the boy her stuffy married sister, Violet, gave away 15 years earlier. (The sisters improbably kept David and Marilyn clueless with a phony study-abroad scheme.) Into this churn, Lombardo adds cancer, infidelity, a heart attack, another unplanned pregnancy, a stillbirth, and an office crush for David. Meanwhile, youngest daughter Grace perpetrates a whopper, and “every day the lie was growing like mold, furring her judgment.” The writing here is silky, if occasionally overwrought. Still, the deft touches—a neighborhood fundraiser for a Little Free Library, a Twilight character as erotic touchstone—delight. The class calibrations are divine even as the utter apolitical whiteness of the Sorenson world becomes hard to fathom.
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet another pleasurable tendril of sisterly malice uncurls.Pub Date: June 25, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54425-2
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: March 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.
Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.
Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s (I Found You, 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5464-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
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