THE CUTTING ROOM

Name: THE CUTTING ROOM
Author: Louise Welsh
ISBN: 1-84195-280-X

by Louise Welsh ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 19, 2003

Strange amorous encounters underscore the dissolute Rilke’s appeal, but the reasons for his dogged sleuthing remain a...

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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

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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THE BULLET TRICK
by Louise Welsh

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TAMBURLAINE MUST DIE
by Louise Welsh

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SUMMER ISLAND

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2001

The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...

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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

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE WOMEN
by Kristin Hannah

- BOOK REVIEW
THE FOUR WINDS
by Kristin Hannah

- BOOK REVIEW
THE GREAT ALONE
by Kristin Hannah

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LAST ORDERS

by Graham Swift ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 5, 1996

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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.