Like Dorothy Sayers's memorably subtitled Busman's Honeymoon, Clark's new cycle of four longish tales is best described as ``A Love Story with Detective Interruptions.'' Certainly her newlywed detective team comes with the most impeccable credentials. Sandra (a.k.a. Sunday) O'Brien Britland, 32, is a beautiful congresswoman from New Jersey; her bridegroom, Henry Parker Britland IV, is the handsome former US President who must have been elected hours after he was old enough to run for the office. Between their Gothic Revival country home in suburban New Jersey and their vacation home in the Bahamas, Henry and Sunday, who apparently aren't affiliated with any political party or platform, might seem to lead a charmed life, but there are perils. In ``A Crime of Passion,'' they set out to clear Henry's former secretary of state of a murder charge, and Sunday ends up looking down the barrel of the killer's gun. Then Sunday is kidnapped herself in ``They All Ran After the President's Wife,'' apparently in exchange for a murderous terrorist who'll stop at nothing—custom-made suits, champagne, caviar, an SST escape—in his demands. ``Hail, Columbia!'' asks what really happened to a Latin American prime minister who disappeared from the Britland family yacht 32 years before Henry buys it back for Sunday. And ``Merry Christmas/Joyeux Noâl'' brings back that old Clark standby, the kidnapped child, in a pale seasonal echo of Silent Night (1995). The real interest here, as in Clark's Alvirah and Willy stories (The Lottery Winner, 1994), is in the romance of wealth, coupled this time with the potent fairy-tale mix of power, glamour, gentility, and a certain endearing obtuseness (``Neither my husband nor I believe in ostentation or in conspicuous consumption,'' Sunday tells her kidnapper). Clark's army of fans won't find any unseemly surprises here- -and will know better than to expect much in the way of mystery or suspense in this gentle, upscale epithalamion. (First printing of 800,000; Literary Guild main selection)
Pub Date: Oct. 22, 1996
ISBN: 0-684-83229-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1996
Fans of smart horror will sink their teeth into this one.
Things are about to get bloody for a group of Charleston housewives.
In 1988, the scariest thing in former nurse Patricia Campbell’s life is showing up to book club, since she hasn’t read the book. It’s hard to get any reading done between raising two kids, Blue and Korey, picking up after her husband, Carter, a psychiatrist, and taking care of her live-in mother-in-law, Miss Mary, who seems to have dementia. It doesn’t help that the books chosen by the Literary Guild of Mt. Pleasant are just plain boring. But when fellow book-club member Kitty gives Patricia a gloriously trashy true-crime novel, Patricia is instantly hooked, and soon she’s attending a very different kind of book club with Kitty and her friends Grace, Slick, and Maryellen. She has a full plate at home, but Patricia values her new friendships and still longs for a bit of excitement. When James Harris moves in down the street, the women are intrigued. Who is this handsome night owl, and why does Miss Mary insist that she knows him? A series of horrific events stretches Patricia’s nerves and her Southern civility to the breaking point. (A skin-crawling scene involving a horde of rats is a standout.) She just knows James is up to no good, but getting anyone to believe her is a Sisyphean feat. After all, she’s just a housewife. Hendrix juxtaposes the hypnotic mundanity of suburbia (which has a few dark underpinnings of its own) against an insidious evil that has taken root in Patricia’s insular neighborhood. It’s gratifying to see her grow from someone who apologizes for apologizing to a fiercely brave woman determined to do the right thing—hopefully with the help of her friends. Hendrix (We Sold Our Souls, 2018, etc.) cleverly sprinkles in nods to well-established vampire lore, and the fact that he’s a master at conjuring heady 1990s nostalgia is just the icing on what is his best book yet.
Fans of smart horror will sink their teeth into this one.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-68369-143-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Quirk Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
The jaws are those of a shark which makes quick work of a pretty young woman on the Long Island shore (Amity) where the disaster is kept quiet in the (financial) interest of the town's summer rentals. This is no longer possible after the next victim—a youngster—and police chief Brody is wrongly blamed for not closing the beaches sconer. He has other troubles — namely a restless young wife who remembers better days playing country club tennis and she is not immune to a visiting ichthyologist, the only one fascinated by the local shark. The finale entails some ugly, lashing action against the big one that's been getting away and all of it is designed to jolt that maneating masculine readership who probably won't notice that it ""should of"" been better written.
Pub Date: Jan. 18, 1973
ISBN: 978-0-345-54414-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: July 2, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1973
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