A fiery, vividly drawn mystery, headlined by a particularly daring belly dancer.
A woman’s double life throws her friends and family into a murderous tailspin.
This debut novel, the first in a planned mystery series, features hardworking Washington, D.C., heroine Jeanne Pelletier. Jeanne, a stuffy contract attorney by day, moonlights as an amateur belly dancer named Zahira at night. A free spirit at 28, she realizes that this alter ego affords her both the freedom to demonstrate her talent for dancing and a true release from the stress and strain of day-job doldrums. During a particularly challenging veil-dancing performance curated by Jeanne’s close, trusted mentor, Yasmina, a fire breaks out at nightclub Algiers and Yasmina is lost in the smoke and flames. Jeanne manages to extract Middle Eastern bar co-owner Ibrahim Abu Ali from the rubble, though he’s been fatally shot in the chest during the melee, a development that embroils her and city police detectives in a homicide investigation. Once the crime is established, the real sleuthing begins, and Jeanne’s slick, smart detective spadework fuels much of this whodunit. As Jeanne, aided by her best friend, Lily, digs deeper into arson allegations and Yasmina’s serpentine history, the attorney also uncovers financial woes for the club, bad blood between two Islamic co-owners, and a scheming sole heir to the family fortune. Her intimate partnership with Lily soon morphs into an enlisted cotillion of crime-solvers, including “ravishing” sister Vivienne and smitten Scottish cybersleuth Fergus McCarrick, both of whom become instrumental in solving the murder. But Jeanne’s encroaching personal skeletons remain unavoidable. Klover (In the Shadow of the Volcano: One Ex-Intelligence Official’s Journey through Slums, Prisons, and Leper Colonies to the Heart of Latin America, 2012) is a former U.S. intelligence analyst and political radio commentator. Especially adept at narrative pacing, a quality that can make or break mystery novels, she establishes a fine momentum right from the rousing first chapters. The tale also incorporates themes of stage performance anxiety (one night, as Zahira, Jeanne “just stood there, immobile. Her feet felt as though they were encased in lead”), Middle Eastern terrorism and Islamic culture, and prejudicial and racial unrest. These facets lend the story a certain sophistication and complexity.
A fiery, vividly drawn mystery, headlined by a particularly daring belly dancer.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-692-51763-5
Page Count: 346
Publisher: Chesapeake Books
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
