Despite the rising body count, Zell (Errata, 2012) keeps this shaggy series debut as mellow as a pipe dream. Only the...
A criminologist lately returned to New Orleans finds that the criminals he’s supposed to identify are the least of his problems in this sweetly wrought fable of criminal consequences.
When Bobby Delery’s parents divorced, his father took the 9-year-old north with him. Now he’s back in the Big Easy to teach at Tulane and work as a consultant to the police department. His first case is an urgent one, because the cops need to find the pair of miscreants who cleaned out the safe of Club Big Easy before Dominic Cavallari, the club’s manager, takes matters into his own hands. Since Mr. C is under considerable pressure from club owner Alex Yevchev to recover his $970,000, Bobby needs to work fast. But he faces obstacles that seem to have nothing to do with the theft. Capt. Patrick Connell demands that Delery ignore a blood trail he’s found near the corpse of Clint Olson, the Big Easy bartender who was clearly in on the job. A person of interest he encounters drives away before Delery can stop him. Delery’s own car attracts the legal attention of a predatory towing company. Every lead he finds is complicated by the fact that everyone in New Orleans is working some angle or stuck in some private fantasy. And Melba Barnes, the retired accountant who’s ended up with the boodle, has an utterly unexpected plan to dispose of it.
Despite the rising body count, Zell (Errata, 2012) keeps this shaggy series debut as mellow as a pipe dream. Only the torrent of local geographical detail will threaten your blood pressure.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-935084-84-6
Page Count: 168
Publisher: Lavender Ink
Review Posted Online: Aug. 25, 2015
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
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