Keeps readers guessing—with humor and romance balancing the whodunit.
A young Tennessee woman investigates strange events concerning a missing drifter, a rock star, and a murdered professor in this debut mystery novel.
In small-town Notchey Creek, Tennessee, everyone knows everyone else. Harley Henrickson can’t overcome her lifelong reputation as a nerdy frump and doesn’t try. Instead, she concentrates on the family whiskey distillery and store, Smoky Mountain Spirits, though she’s often distracted by the shenanigans of her pet pig, Matilda, and her colorful great-aunt, Wilma True, secretary for the distillery and a surrogate parent to Harley. Once, Harley was college-bound with a Harvard scholarship and wanted to be a writer. But when her grandfather, who raised her, became ill, she stayed in Notchey Creek to care for him; when he died, she inherited the distillery and shelved university plans. With the autumn festival about to start, the town’s business leaders want no problems—but first, a stranger is discovered drunk in a ditch (and wanders away again). Then rock star Beau Arson, with his considerable entourage, takes over an entire resort, and later Dr. Patrick Middleton, the wealthy and respected president of the Historical Society, is found dead, perhaps murdered. The town sheriff, ex–NFL player Jed Turner, is distracted by girlfriend problems so Harley investigates—a search that will take her back into her own childhood and several long-kept, explosive secrets. In her novel, Andrews—like her heroine—mixes up a tasty cocktail out of appealing ingredients. Though the tone can be uneven, veering uncomfortably between corn pone and gothic, the twisty, complex plot is intelligently managed and full of surprises. Characters, too, are multilayered; Beau is more than a bad-boy rocker, for example. The Appalachian setting adds flavor, as with local Scottish-Irish settlers’ legends about Samhain, when “spirits would come down from the Smoky Mountains at dusk, and carried by the evening mist, they would haunt the Tennessee Valley until dawn.” Many townspeople do seem haunted, by spirits, the past, or memories. Harley, for example, remembers a boy who was kind to her when she was a grieving child—a boy whom, the book hints, she might reconnect with.
Keeps readers guessing—with humor and romance balancing the whodunit.Pub Date: Nov. 27, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-73158-176-1
Page Count: 242
Publisher: Time Tunnel Media
Review Posted Online: Jan. 8, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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