A deftly constructed and thoroughly enjoyable small-town murder mystery with a Christmas twist.
A sequel offers a holiday homicide case for a Southern whiskey distiller and sleuth.
Notchey Creek, Tennessee, is in the throes of the holiday season, and Harley Henrickson, whiskey maker and owner of the Smoky Mountain Spirits liquor store, is plenty busy. The festivities this year include a New Year’s Eve Ball at Briarcliffe, the local mansion on the grounds of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. The mansion has a new resident: Beau Arson, rock star and scion of the Sutcliffe lumber family. Unfortunately, Beau has been experiencing some paranormal activity in the house, which ghost hunter Justin Wheeler is happy to tell him is the result of a woman who killed herself in the property’s woods on Christmas Day in the late 1800s. The strange thing is that Harley and her pet pig, Matilda, have just discovered the body of a woman in those same woods. But when Harley stepped away to call the police, the body disappeared. After a second body—this one someone Harley knows well—is found, she realizes that she must once again set aside her whiskey barrels and put on her investigator’s hat before this mayhem ruins Notchey Creek’s celebrated Small Town Christmas Festival. Andrews (The Mist Rises Over Notchey Creek, 2018) spins her holiday yarn with a pleasing mix of cheer and dread: “Beneath the hand lay a mound of body, like a snowman fallen on its side, and Harley brushed the snow from the torso, revealing a woman’s black dress. She worked her way up to the head region, where threads of dark hair swirled in a frozen pattern on the snow.” The novel has a classic feel, and of all the day jobs that an amateur detective might have, whiskey distiller is certainly a fun one (and fitting with the Smoky Mountains landscape). The book is a perfect choice for reading by the fire after the Christmas guests have gone home, though it may keep readers up late into the night.
A deftly constructed and thoroughly enjoyable small-town murder mystery with a Christmas twist.Pub Date: Nov. 21, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-69743-191-9
Page Count: 334
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Dec. 27, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.
Pub Date: April 5, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-41224-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
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