From the Yorkshire-based Bedford, a suspenseful saga of a sociopath's return to his painful past, seeking vengeance for slights real and imagined from his former teachers. Bachelor Gregory Lynn, 35, has lived with his mother, in strangeness and seclusion, for most of his adult life. But her death, and his subsequent discovery of old school reports, releases disturbing memories, sending Gregory out on a systematic hunt for his ``oppressors''—the details of which are given here in retrospect as Gregory is interviewed by a legal team preparing to defend him against a number of charges, including murder. After subjecting an ex-history teacher to an anonymous blitz of hate- mail, Gregory visits Wales and his former geography instructor, a provocative dresser who once caught him masturbating in class. He stalks her for days, assaults her, but then lets her go without raping her. A series of letters between Gregory and his sympathetic English teacher follows—an exchange that starts well but ends with Gregory threatening her, too. Contact with his math instructor is thwarted when he discovers that the man is dead, but a visit with his bullying gym teacher proves more satisfying: Gregory finds him at home in Oxford and tortures him before being forced to flee. Now hunted himself, Gregory takes refuge with his freethinking art instructor but leaves when his uncontrollable appetite for revenge sours the understanding they once had. Gregory's final act of vengeance, though, is reserved for the hated Mr. Boyle, still teaching science at the school where an assault on him 20-odd years before led to Gregory's expulsion. Taking Boyle hostage in his classroom, Gregory extracts a night of torment from his victim before bringing matters to a violent, unpredictable end. Thoroughly unsettling, this tale forcefully presents the workings of a deranged mind in all its complexity while retaining the page-turning pleasures of a genuine thriller. A riveting debut. (Book-of-the-Month Club selection; author tour)
Pub Date: Aug. 7, 1996
ISBN: 0-385-48273-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1996
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
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