Cerebral, wise and compassionate, Gamache is destined for stardom. Don’t miss this stellar debut.
Three Pines, an appealing Quebecois community, is shaken by the death of a beloved longtime village schoolteacher and unsung artist.
Chief Inspector Armand Gamache and his team find that Miss Jane Neal has been shot through the heart with an arrow. Is it a hunting accident or murder? Gamache sets up shop in the charming village B&B owned by a gay couple but is suspended when he refuses to arrest a local bowman who confesses after his sullen son is fingered for the crime. His longtime associate Beauvoir takes over while Gamache ponders the case. Jane, who never exhibited her work, had just had an astonishing folk art painting accepted for a show. Her obnoxious niece Yolande, who can’t wait to get into Jane’s house, gets a court order to keep the police out. Meanwhile, an equally arrogant trainee has not done her job checking wills, and a new one turns up leaving almost everything to Jane’s neighbor Clara Morrow, a married artist who’d been like a daughter to Jane, whose youthful romance had been quashed by her parents. Because no one had ever been allowed past Jane’s kitchen, everyone’s dumbfounded to find walls, recently covered by Yolande in appalling wallpaper, full of murals. The slight difference Clara notices between the murals and Jane’s painting holds the clue to her murder.
Cerebral, wise and compassionate, Gamache is destined for stardom. Don’t miss this stellar debut.Pub Date: July 17, 2006
ISBN: 0-312-35255-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dunne/Minotaur
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2006
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
Her zany cast will have readers wondering whether DiRico’s series debut is set in Belle View or Bellevue.
Murder crashes the party.
Mia Carina would like nothing better than to see her dad, Ravello, a made man in Donny Boldano’s mob, go straight. When she hears he’s won the Belle View Banquet Manor from hard-luck gambler Andre Bouras in a poker game, she rushes back from Palm Beach to help him run the place, hoping it will provide her dad with enough legitimate income to allow him to cut his ties with the underworld. Despite its dated décor and bone-shaking proximity to LaGuardia Airport, the catering hall has panoramic views out its windows that make it a worthy rival to the overpriced event venues in Manhattan—which Mia’s outer-borough friends drive her nuts by calling “the city.” (“Queens is the city” is her perennial retort.) And she proves her borough cred by moving in with her nonna in Astoria. But running a catering hall involves more than dealing with bridezillas like Alice Paluski, who’s determined to make her wedding bigger and better than her twin sister’s, or with momzillas like Barbara Grazio, Alice’s prospective mother-in-law, who’s determined to make the groom’s side of the wedding outshine the bride’s. She has to wrangle an ever changing cast of chefs, sous-chefs, waitstaff, decorators, DJs, and the occasional stripper, who all bring a host of quirks and baggage to the banquet table. She also has to deal with more than one corpse. It takes all of Mia’s considerable ingenuity to keep Ravello’s first legit enterprise from becoming a ticket right back to the slammer.
Her zany cast will have readers wondering whether DiRico’s series debut is set in Belle View or Bellevue.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-4967-2534-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Kensington
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Perfect for readers who wish To Kill a Mockingbird had been presented from a slightly older, male point of view.
Eskens’ latest novel is a warmhearted story of a white teenager's awakening to the racial tensions that run through his Missouri town in 1976.
Years before he’ll become a successful attorney (The Shadows We Hide, 2018, etc.), Boady Sanden struggles to navigate all the usual high school ordeals in small-town Jessup, including boring subjects and bullying by the likes of all-state wrestler and prom king Jarvis Halcomb. In Boady’s case, these everyday problems are aggravated by his outsider status as a non-Catholic freshman at St. Ignatius High School, his home life with his widowed, introverted mother, Emma, and, most recently, the arrival of some new neighbors, the Elgins. Charles Elgin is definitely an improvement on indolent Cecil Halcomb, Jarvis' father, whom he replaces as manager of the local manufacturing plant after bookkeeper Lida Poe disappears with more than $100,000 of the plant’s money. Jenna Elgin is excellent company for Emma Sanden, whom she helps draw out of her shell. And after a comically unfortunate first encounter, Boady quickly takes to their son, Thomas, who’s exactly his age. But the Elgins, like Lida Poe, are African American, and the combination of an unsolved embezzlement, good old boy Cecil’s displacement by an outsider, and the town’s incipient racism works slowly but inexorably to put Boady, recruited by the Crusaders of Racial Purity and Strength, under pressure to betray his new friendship. Declining to join the racists but repeatedly running away rather than refusing their demands point blank, Boady must navigate a perilous route to supporting his community and claiming his own adult identity.
Perfect for readers who wish To Kill a Mockingbird had been presented from a slightly older, male point of view.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-316-50972-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Mulholland Books/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2019
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