Despite loopy plotting and an unresolved ending: a fun, breezy, suspenseful delight.
Flip, flashy series debut, starring beautiful, spunky, tough-talking and crack-shooting FBI agent Penelope “Poppy” Rice as a special investigator poking into miscarriages of justice.
Reviving a minor character from her most recent novel, Smith maintains the not-quite-over-the-top wackiness that made An American Killing (1999) so much fun. Agent Rice, having somehow straightened out the Bureau's infamously inept crime lab, is given permission by a grateful director to open up the old and certainly hopeless case of Texas axe murderer Rona Leigh Cooke, who is just days away from execution. Having found a written request for crime lab evidence that was mysteriously denied, Rice takes a second look at Cooke, a short, frail woman who claims to have found Jesus on death row and is currently a national celebrity as the first female to face execution in Texas in more than a century. Could such a woman, who weighed less than 100 pounds when arrested, have had the physical strength to wield a 25-pound ax and, with her ne’er-do-well husband at her side, butcher a man and woman caught in flagrante in a seedy Texas motel? The husband, having died in prison of AIDS, is no help. Rice sets off for Texas and, with the help of handsome but wary Texas Ranger Max Scruggs, as well as a Catholic cardinal hoping to gain publicity for counseling the woman on death row, finds herself hip-deep in gruff, steak-chomping, beer-guzzling blowhards, from Vernon Lacker, the squirming prison chaplain who has married the now-saintly Cooke, to the state's unnamed drunken good-old-boy governor, who refuses to delay the execution. Smith throws in a series of terrific plot twists as the unshakeable Rice finds herself the prisoner of a lunatic religious sect with the FBI at the gates, ready to do anything but the right thing to free her.
Despite loopy plotting and an unresolved ending: a fun, breezy, suspenseful delight.Pub Date: Jan. 11, 2002
ISBN: 0-8050-6648-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2001
A not-very-illuminating updating of Chaucer’s Tales.
Continuing his apparent mission to refract the whole of English culture and history through his personal lens, Ackroyd (Thames: The Biography, 2008, etc.) offers an all-prose rendering of Chaucer’s mixed-media masterpiece.
While Burton Raffel’s modern English version of The Canterbury Tales (2008) was unabridged, Ackroyd omits both “The Tale of Melibee” and “The Parson’s Tale” on the undoubtedly correct assumption that these “standard narratives of pious exposition” hold little interest for contemporary readers. Dialing down the piety, the author dials up the raunch, freely tossing about the F-bomb and Anglo-Saxon words for various body parts that Chaucer prudently described in Latin. Since “The Wife of Bath’s Tale” and “The Miller’s Tale,” for example, are both decidedly earthy in Middle English, the interpolated obscenities seem unnecessary as well as jarringly anachronistic. And it’s anyone’s guess why Ackroyd feels obliged redundantly to include the original titles (“Here bigynneth the Squieres Tales,” etc.) directly underneath the new ones (“The Squires Tale,” etc.); these one-line blasts of antique spelling and diction remind us what we’re missing without adding anything in the way of comprehension. The author’s other peculiar choice is to occasionally interject first-person comments by the narrator where none exist in the original, such as, “He asked me about myself then—where I had come from, where I had been—but I quickly turned the conversation to another course.” There seems to be no reason for these arbitrary elaborations, which muffle the impact of those rare times in the original when Chaucer directly addresses the reader. Such quibbles would perhaps be unfair if Ackroyd were retelling some obscure gem of Old English, but they loom larger with Chaucer because there are many modern versions of The Canterbury Tales. Raffel’s rendering captured a lot more of the poetry, while doing as good a job as Ackroyd with the vigorous prose.
A not-very-illuminating updating of Chaucer’s Tales.Pub Date: Nov. 16, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-670-02122-2
Page Count: 436
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2009
PERSPECTIVES
Gorgeous and troubling.
Cartoonist Kuper (Kafkaesque, 2018, etc.) delivers a graphic-novel adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s literary classic exploring the horror at the center of colonial exploitation.
As a group of sailors floats on the River Thames in 1899, a particularly adventurous member notes that England was once “one of the dark places of the earth,” referring to the land before the arrival of the Romans. This well-connected vagabond then regales his friends with his boyhood obsession with the blank places on maps, which eventually led him to captain a steamboat up a great African river under the employ of a corporate empire dedicated to ripping the riches from foreign land. Marlow’s trip to what was known as the Dark Continent exposes him to the frustrations of bureaucracy, the inhumanity employed by Europeans on the local population, and the insanity plaguing those committed to turning a profit. In his introduction, Kuper outlines his approach to the original book, which featured extensive use of the n-word and worked from a general worldview that European males are the forgers of civilization (even if they suffered a “soul [that] had gone mad” for their efforts), explaining that “by choosing a different point of view to illustrate, otherwise faceless and undefined characters were brought to the fore without altering Conrad’s text.” There is a moment when a scene of indiscriminate shelling reveals the Africans fleeing, and there are some places where the positioning of the Africans within the panel gives them more prominence, but without new text added to fully frame the local people, it’s hard to feel that they have reached equal footing. Still, Kuper’s work admirably deletes the most offensive of Conrad’s language while presenting graphically the struggle of the native population in the face of foreign exploitation. Kuper is a master cartoonist, and his pages and panels are a feast for the eyes.
Gorgeous and troubling.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-393-63564-5
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Aug. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2019
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