An absorbing whodunit full of gangsters and glitz.
In Conway’s (Thieving Forest, 2014, etc.) latest novel, a young jazz pianist encounters kidnapping, rumrunning, and gunplay in 1920s Chicago.
In 1921, Eve Louise Riser is living her dream, getting by on her own and hopping trains from town to town as the pianist in the Stoptime Syncopaters trio. Still in her early 20s, Eve “had four songs published already under the name E. R. King.” But everything changes for the worse one night when she stumbles back to her railroad car with the band’s good-looking saxophone player and they’re accosted by a mysterious thug. Soon Eve faces “one hard turn after another” in Chicago, as she and her sister, Eulalie, nicknamed “Chickie,” find themselves mixed up with gunrunners, mobsters, and a cross-dressing bootlegger. At one point, a sudden hail of bullets strikes Eve and kills the stranger beside her. Eve is an African-American in a racist town, and the ubiquity of discrimination (and lynchings in the nearby countryside) shows her how “fear turns to something you can smell or taste.” Readers meet a cast of dozens, among them pretty-boy Gavin Johnson, the aforementioned sax player, who slips Eve a wad of cash and puts her on a train to escape a murder rap; Nathan Cobb, an ex-musician with a temper and a rolodex of shady connections; and a mysterious scar-faced gangster known as Victor “The Walnut” Rausch. Impressively, each character stands out clearly and does real work to move the story forward. The author marvelously keeps events gliding along without sacrificing either detail or atmosphere. She deftly evokes the neon streets of Chicago, where “soon there’d be more motorcars than horses,” in a few spare strokes (“on the corner some kids were playing instruments in the rain—a washtub with a string, a drum made of hubcaps”). Conway is a straightforward writer but not one that disdains eloquence; there are some deft phrases here (Eve’s mother “drank too much and took in laundry. In that order”) and real suspense for anyone who likes a good mystery.
An absorbing whodunit full of gangsters and glitz.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Noontime Books
Review Posted Online: May 8, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet...
Four Chicago sisters anchor a sharp, sly family story of feminine guile and guilt.
Newcomer Lombardo brews all seven deadly sins into a fun and brimming tale of an unapologetically bougie couple and their unruly daughters. In the opening scene, Liza Sorenson, daughter No. 3, flirts with a groomsman at her sister’s wedding. “There’s four of you?” he asked. “What’s that like?” Her retort: “It’s a vast hormonal hellscape. A marathon of instability and hair products.” Thus begins a story bristling with a particular kind of female intel. When Wendy, the oldest, sets her sights on a mate, she “made sure she left her mark throughout his house—soy milk in the fridge, box of tampons under the sink, surreptitious spritzes of her Bulgari musk on the sheets.” Turbulent Wendy is the novel’s best character, exuding a delectable bratty-ness. The parents—Marilyn, all pluck and busy optimism, and David, a genial family doctor—strike their offspring as impossibly happy. Lombardo levels this vision by interspersing chapters of the Sorenson parents’ early lean times with chapters about their daughters’ wobbly forays into adulthood. The central story unfurls over a single event-choked year, begun by Wendy, who unlatches a closed adoption and springs on her family the boy her stuffy married sister, Violet, gave away 15 years earlier. (The sisters improbably kept David and Marilyn clueless with a phony study-abroad scheme.) Into this churn, Lombardo adds cancer, infidelity, a heart attack, another unplanned pregnancy, a stillbirth, and an office crush for David. Meanwhile, youngest daughter Grace perpetrates a whopper, and “every day the lie was growing like mold, furring her judgment.” The writing here is silky, if occasionally overwrought. Still, the deft touches—a neighborhood fundraiser for a Little Free Library, a Twilight character as erotic touchstone—delight. The class calibrations are divine even as the utter apolitical whiteness of the Sorenson world becomes hard to fathom.
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet another pleasurable tendril of sisterly malice uncurls.Pub Date: June 25, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54425-2
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: March 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.
Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.
Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s (I Found You, 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5464-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
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