A good-natured combination of hammy modern and more sensitive historical mysteries, amounting to something rather less...
The hunt for an ornithological marvel is entwined with a period love story.
BBC producer Davies (Mrs. Hudson and the Spirits’ Curse, 2004, etc.) roots his twin-pronged story in historical fact. Captain Cook’s second voyage of discovery produced the only known specimen of the Mysterious Bird of Ulieta, which ended up stuffed in the collection of Sir Joseph Banks, the naturalist who accompanied Cook on his first voyage. Here, “the rarest bird ever recorded” becomes the subject of a double-crossing, three-way race involving unconventional British academic Fitz and his lovely young sidekick/lodger Katya. Invited to help find the bird by Gabby, Fitz’s old love (and wife) and her new, rich partner Karl Anderson, they think they are tracing a source of DNA to be added to the private Gene Ark project. But the bird’s display case is also reputed to contain rare botanical paintings, thereby bringing slippery American sleuth Emeric Potts to the party. Interleaved with the story of Joseph Banks and his mistress Mary Burnett, the modern tale moves sluggishly. Much greater animation infuses the historical chapters recounting the impossible love between Banks and the disgraced countrywoman he saves from penury and shame. Burnett moves to London as Banks’s kept woman and their briefly transcendent involvement inspires his suggestion that she accompany him on the second Cook expedition, disguised as a man. Burnett, whose drawing and painting skills are exceptional, meets the ship in Madeira, but Banks is not on board, having withdrawn, insulted, after a change in cabin arrangements. Although reunited, the couple can never marry and after the birth of their daughter Sophia, Burnett slips out of the picture, taking the gift of the bird. Back in the present, Fitz dupes Anderson and Potts. The paintings were lost in a fire; the bird will stay in the loving possession of Sophia’s descendants.
A good-natured combination of hammy modern and more sensitive historical mysteries, amounting to something rather less fabulous than The Maltese Falcon.Pub Date: Jan. 3, 2006
ISBN: 1-4000-9733-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Shaye Areheart/Harmony
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
A suspenseful, professional-grade north country procedural whose heroine, a deft mix of compassion and attitude, would be...
Box takes another break from his highly successful Joe Pickett series (Stone Cold, 2014, etc.) for a stand-alone about a police detective, a developmentally delayed boy, and a package everyone in North Dakota wants to grab.
Cassandra Dewell can’t leave Montana’s Lewis and Clark County fast enough for her new job as chief investigator for Jon Kirkbride, sheriff of Bakken County. She leaves behind no memories worth keeping: her husband is dead, her boss has made no bones about disliking her, and she’s looking forward to new responsibilities and the higher salary underwritten by North Dakota’s sudden oil boom. But Bakken County has its own issues. For one thing, it’s cold—a whole lot colder than the coldest weather Cassie’s ever imagined. For another, the job she turns out to have been hired for—leading an investigation her new boss doesn’t feel he can entrust to his own force—makes her queasy. The biggest problem, though, is one she doesn’t know about until it slaps her in the face. A fatal car accident that was anything but accidental has jarred loose a stash of methamphetamines and cash that’s become the center of a battle between the Sons of Freedom, Bakken County’s traditional drug sellers, and MS-13, the Salvadorian upstarts who are muscling in on their territory. It’s a setup that leaves scant room for law enforcement officers or for Kyle Westergaard, the 12-year-old paperboy damaged since birth by fetal alcohol syndrome, who’s walked away from the wreck with a prize all too many people would kill for.
A suspenseful, professional-grade north country procedural whose heroine, a deft mix of compassion and attitude, would be welcome to return and tie up the gaping loose end Box leaves. The unrelenting cold makes this the perfect beach read.Pub Date: July 28, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-58321-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: April 21, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2015
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s...
The acclaimed author of The Underground Railroad (2016) follows up with a leaner, meaner saga of Deep South captivity set in the mid-20th century and fraught with horrors more chilling for being based on true-life atrocities.
Elwood Curtis is a law-abiding, teenage paragon of rectitude, an avid reader of encyclopedias and after-school worker diligently overcoming hardships that come from being abandoned by his parents and growing up black and poor in segregated Tallahassee, Florida. It’s the early 1960s, and Elwood can feel changes coming every time he listens to an LP of his hero Martin Luther King Jr. sermonizing about breaking down racial barriers. But while hitchhiking to his first day of classes at a nearby black college, Elwood accepts a ride in what turns out to be a stolen car and is sentenced to the Nickel Academy, a juvenile reformatory that looks somewhat like the campus he’d almost attended but turns out to be a monstrously racist institution whose students, white and black alike, are brutally beaten, sexually abused, and used by the school’s two-faced officials to steal food and supplies. At first, Elwood thinks he can work his way past the arbitrary punishments and sadistic treatment (“I am stuck here, but I’ll make the best of it…and I’ll make it brief”). He befriends another black inmate, a street-wise kid he knows only as Turner, who has a different take on withstanding Nickel: “The key to in here is the same as surviving out there—you got to see how people act, and then you got to figure out how to get around them like an obstacle course.” And if you defy them, Turner warns, you’ll get taken “out back” and are never seen or heard from again. Both Elwood’s idealism and Turner’s cynicism entwine into an alliance that compels drastic action—and a shared destiny. There's something a tad more melodramatic in this book's conception (and resolution) than one expects from Whitehead, giving it a drugstore-paperback glossiness that enhances its blunt-edged impact.
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s novel displays its author’s facility with violent imagery and his skill at weaving narrative strands into an ingenious if disquieting whole.Pub Date: July 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-53707-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
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SEEN & HEARD
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