RACE MUSIC

Name: RACE MUSIC
Author: Mark Herder
ISBN: 978-1-5229-8223-4

by Mark Herder ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 20, 2017

In this engrossing and atmospheric tale, a racially charged killing reveals the fissures of an intricately drawn St. Louis...

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A police officer investigates the murder of a singer amid racial and ethnic tensions in the mid-20th-century Midwest.

In this historical novel, Herder (Krazee Mouse Blues, 2015, etc.) introduces a variety of memorable characters who populate the St. Louis suburb of Marecage in 1963. Home to prostitutes, drug dealers, mobsters, and cops who subscribe to a wide range of moralities, Marecage is a low-rent district along the Mississippi River (“Several square blocks of rickety-brick nightclubs, taverns, flop joints, whorehouses, and warehouses, all squeezed along a crumbling cobblestone levee as if the city had swept all its filth into a pile and left it on the banks of the Mississippi for the next big flood to wash it away”). When crooner Eddie Devine is found dead in a Marecage motel room shortly after performing to an adoring, mixed-race crowd, Tony Waluska is among the police officers assigned to investigate. As the initial bungling of the crime scene unravels, Tony’s pursuit of the truth—during his breaks from “the worlds of smack and Jack”)—puts him at odds with the city’s power brokers and the people who have an interest in sweeping Devine’s death under the rug. Tony leaves town, returning in 1981 and renewing his interest in the cold case just as the city’s first African-American mayoral candidate would prefer to see it forgotten. Herder has a talent for developing his characters’ voices, not only in dialogue, but also in their frequent internal monologues (“Tony Waluska, well, he floats between the lines, hugging and kissing everyone, knowing everyone, a cop with a smile as big as his hands”). But the frequent use of racial slurs, while appropriate to the characters, grows grating. The sprawling cast of secondary players contains striking and fully developed figures, from ex-stripper Gloria Hallelujah to well-intentioned priest Father Piechowski. Although readers will likely lose the main thread of the plot among the occasionally wandering backstory, Herder ultimately provides an engaging mystery with a satisfying resolution.

In this engrossing and atmospheric tale, a racially charged killing reveals the fissures of an intricately drawn St. Louis community.

Pub Date: Dec. 20, 2017

ISBN: 978-1-5229-8223-4

Page Count: 300

Publisher: Bison Blues Press

Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2018

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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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

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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.