A three-scoop helping of Holmesiana ranging from reprints of classic parodies by Bret Harte and O. Henry to evergreen pastiches by Vincent Starrett, August Derleth, and Stuart Palmer to new stories by Jon Koons, Roberta Rogow, and Carole BuggÇ (whose ``Adventure of the Tongue-Tied Tenor'' is a particular standout). The emphasis is on fictional items—Holmes is sent to Oz (Ruth Berman) and Damon Runyon's New York (Craig Shaw Gardner), pitted against the Nazis (Manly Wade Wellman) and a doppelgÑnger (Darrell Schweitzer), set to solve the mysteries of Edwin Drood (Edmund Pearson) and Little Red Riding-Hood (Anthony Boucher). But there are also some ten essayistic pieces contemplating Holmes's parentage (Jacques Barzun), his disguises (editor Kaye), and his adventures in Tibet (Amanda Russell), and offering testimony by Mrs. Hudson (ZaSu Pitts), Professor Moriarty (Robert Bloch), and Holmes himself (Maurice Baring). Of the 53 selections, all but a dozen reprinted—though many of the reprints are not easily available elsewhere—the stories are clearly superior to the essays, though the line between the two isn't always easy to draw. Veteran anthologist Kaye (Masterpieces of Terror and the Supernatural—not reviewed—etc.) aims for inclusiveness, right down to his useful Holmesiography, and the only glaring omission is Rex Stout's Baker Street burlesque ``Watson Was a Woman.'' Devotees will be too grateful to complain about its absence, or about the inevitable unevenness of the assembled works—nor will they be foolish enough to devour this sumptuous feast in a single sitting.
Pub Date: April 18, 1994
ISBN: 0-312-10468-5
Page Count: 528
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1994
Categories: GENERAL MYSTERY & DETECTIVE | MYSTERY & DETECTIVE
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A convicted killer’s list of five people he wants dead runs the gamut from the wife he’s already had murdered to franchise heroine Ali Reynolds.
Back in the day, women came from all over to consult Santa Clarita fertility specialist Dr. Edward Gilchrist. Many of them left his care happily pregnant, never dreaming that the father of the babies they carried was none other than the physician himself, who donated his own sperm rather than that of the handsome, athletic, disease-free men pictured in his scrapbook. When Alexandra Munsey’s son, Evan, is laid low by the kidney disease he’s inherited from his biological father and she returns to Gilchrist in search of the donor’s medical records, the roof begins to fall in on him. By the time it’s done falling, he’s serving a life sentence in Folsom Prison for commissioning the death of his wife, Dawn, the former nurse and sometime egg donor who’d turned on him. With nothing left to lose, Gilchrist tattoos himself with the initials of five people he blames for his fall: Dawn; Leo Manuel Aurelio, the hit man he’d hired to dispose of her; Kaitlyn Todd, the nurse/receptionist who took Dawn’s place; Alex Munsey, whose search for records upset his apple cart; and Ali Reynolds, the TV reporter who’d helped put Alex in touch with the dozen other women who formed the Progeny Project because their children looked just like hers. No matter that Ali’s been out of both California and the news business for years; Gilchrist and his enablers know that revenge can’t possibly be served too cold. Wonder how far down that list they’ll get before Ali, aided once more by Frigg, the methodical but loose-cannon AI first introduced in Duel to the Death (2018), turns on them?
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how little the boundary-challenged AI, who gets into the case more or less inadvertently, differs from your standard human sidekick with issues.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5101-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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A tale of two artists, living 78 years apart in a small Southern town, and the third artist who links them.
The fates of two white painters in Edenton, North Carolina, intertwine with the legacy of a third, that of Jesse Jameson Williams, a prominent African American artist with Edenton roots. In 2018, the recently deceased Jesse has left a very unusual will. In life, Jesse paid his success forward by helping underdog artists. Morgan Christopher, the last, posthumous recipient of Jesse’s largesse, can’t imagine why he chose her, a complete stranger who is doing time for an alcohol-related crash that left another driver paralyzed. Released on an early parole engineered by Jesse’s daughter, Lisa, Morgan will receive $50,000 to restore a mural painted by one Anna Dale in 1940 in time for a gallery opening on Aug. 5, 2018. If Morgan misses this deadline, not only is her deal off, but Lisa will, due to a puzzling, thinly motivated condition of Jesse’s will, lose her childhood home. In an alternating narrative, Anna, winner of a U.S. Treasury Department competition, has been sent from her native New Jersey to paint a mural for the Edenton post office. Anna has zero familiarity with the South, particularly with Jim Crow. She recognizes Jesse’s exceptional talent and mentors him, to the ire of Edenton’s white establishment. Martin Drapple, a local portraitist rejected in the competition, is at first a good sport, when he’s sober, until, somewhat too suddenly, he’s neither. Issues of addiction and mental illness are foremost in both past and present. Anna’s late mother had manic episodes. Morgan’s estranged parents are unrepentant boozers. And Anna’s mural of civic pride is decidedly strange. One of the strengths here is the creditable depiction of the painter’s process, in Anna’s case, and the restorer’s art, in Morgan’s. Despite the fraught circumstances challenging all three painters, conflict is lacking. The 1940 racial tensions are unrealistically mild, and Jesse’s testamentary testiness is not mined for its full stakes-raising potential.
An engaging, well-researched, and sometimes thought-provoking art mystery.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-08733-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 14, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019
Categories: GENERAL MYSTERY & DETECTIVE | MYSTERY & DETECTIVE | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP
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