A nice variety of bad behavior. East, West: Noir’s best.
Novelist Mengiste presents 14 stories showcasing Ethiopia’s capital at its darkest.
History has not always been kind to Addis Ababa. From 1974 through '87, when the Provisional Military Government of Socialist Ethiopia, known as the Derg, ruled the country, armed militias kept order at gunpoint. Those brutal days are chronicled in Teferi Nigussie Tafa’s “Agony of the Congested Heart” and editor Mengiste’s “Of Dust and Ash.” Nature plays its own part in human misery. In Mikael Awake’s “Father Bread,” a pack of hyenas decimates a young boy’s family. Cultural practices like female circumcision also take their toll, as Sulaiman Addonia shows in “A Night in Bela Sefer” and Linda Yohannes demonstrates in “Kebele ID,” in which a housemaid compensates for the loss of her pleasure by stealing from her employers. Some misery has otherworldly sources, as in Adam Reta’s “Of Buns and Howls.” But some individuals can be cruel even in the absence of external forces. A survivor of the Derg takes revenge on an unlikely target in Meron Hadero’s “Kind Stranger.” And in “A Double-Edged Inheritance,” Hannah Giorgis presents a college student who avenges her mother’s mistreatment by her father’s family. And of course, people can be their own worst enemies, as in Lelissa Girma’s “Insomnia” and Girma T. Fantaye’s “Of the Poet and the Café.”
A nice variety of bad behavior. East, West: Noir’s best.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-61775-820-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Akashic
Review Posted Online: June 2, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The story is sadly familiar, the treatment claustrophobically intense.
Twenty years after Chloe Davis’ father was convicted of killing half a dozen young women, someone seems to be celebrating the anniversary by extending the list.
No one in little Breaux Bridge, Louisiana, was left untouched by Richard Davis’ confession, least of all his family members. His wife, Mona, tried to kill herself and has been incapacitated ever since. His son, Cooper, became so suspicious that even now it’s hard for him to accept pharmaceutical salesman Daniel Briggs, whose sister, Sophie, also vanished 20 years ago, as Chloe’s fiance. And Chloe’s own nightmares, which lead her to rebuff New York Times reporter Aaron Jansen, who wants to interview her for an anniversary story, are redoubled when her newest psychiatric patient, Lacey Deckler, follows the path of high school student Aubrey Gravino by disappearing and then turning up dead. The good news is that Dick Davis, whom Chloe has had no contact with ever since he was imprisoned after his confession, obviously didn’t commit these new crimes. The bad news is that someone else did, someone who knows a great deal about the earlier cases, someone who could be very close to Chloe indeed. First-timer Willingham laces her first-person narrative with a stifling sense of victimhood that extends even to the survivors and a series of climactic revelations, at least some of which are guaranteed to surprise the most hard-bitten readers.
The story is sadly familiar, the treatment claustrophobically intense.Pub Date: Jan. 11, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-2508-0382-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A novel hook introduces an otherwise standard cozy.
The risks mount as the oddball business venture Emma Westlake launched in A Plus One for Murder (2021) picks up steam.
It took a lot of guts, some ingenuity, and a little bit of prodding from her octogenarian pal, Dottie Adler, but it looks like A Friend for Hire, Emma’s service for folks who need someone to offer unconditional support in their hour of need, is going to be a decent earner after all. In addition to Dottie, who still pays Emma for having tea with her once a week, there are three other clients and a fourth in the works. But Kim Felder, Emma’s newest paying friend, comes with a lot of baggage. She’s sad and lonely because now that her kids are grown, she has no one who needs her. But she’s also really, really angry because her husband dumped her for his thin, blond secretary. Emma encourages Kim to vent her frustrations on paper, writing down all the things she’d like to do to her ex. Which might be good psychology but turns out to be terrible advice from a legal standpoint, since once someone actually does strangle that old cheat Roger, the list provides Deputy Jack Riordan ample evidence to arrest Kim. Now Emma has two problems: First, her client is in the hoosegow, and second, she’s fighting with Jack just as their relationship is moving from the “friends” to the “dating” column. There’s only one way to fix this mess, and it doesn’t take Sherlock Holmes to figure out who has to crack this case.
A novel hook introduces an otherwise standard cozy.Pub Date: July 5, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-59333-478-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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