Strange amorous encounters underscore the dissolute Rilke’s appeal, but the reasons for his dogged sleuthing remain a...
A debut crime novel with aspirations, featuring a quintessential flawed hero, a smart and morally ambivalent gay Glaswegian auctioneer.
Rilke’s fixations are far from noble when he first enters the McKindless place, a gloomy townhouse complete with a sharp-eyed spinster seeking a quick sale of her just-deceased brother’s belongings. Rilke’s auction house, long-established in Glasgow but a good deal seedier than Sotheby’s, hasn’t seen quality of the kind he’s being offered in a generation, so he swallows his questions and proceeds with business. While going through the brother’s private office in the attic, at the spinster’s request, Rilke finds an envelope full of pornographic photos featuring the deceased, decades younger, but Rilke’s blood congeals at the sight of some of them, since they seem to depict real torture and worse. He opens an investigation of his own—after being picked up in a police raid of a gay hotspot and saved by an old chum on the force, only to help another old chum, now a drug dealer, move his stash to a more secure location after he’s been raided. The search takes him to a porno-film producer, then to a would-be actress running a private peepshow; the deeper in Rilke gets, the more repulsed and fascinated. Even after the actress reveals that McKindless had engaged her for a necrophilia photo shoot, and suggested “cutting” her, Rilke still doesn’t take what he knows to his friend the policeman. Something keeps him digging until a brush with death, more tangible evidence of McKindless’s evil deeds, and action from beyond the grave threaten to bring the unspeakable horrors of the past to life again.
Strange amorous encounters underscore the dissolute Rilke’s appeal, but the reasons for his dogged sleuthing remain a mystery, making him a shadowy figure as frustrating as he is fascinating to observe.Pub Date: March 19, 2003
ISBN: 1-84195-280-X
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Canongate
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
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