A satisfying mystery pleasantly told.
This second installment of a series offers another adventure for a crime-solving architect and his friend’s talented cat.
Mary Questman—a wealthy widow, noted philanthropist, and owner of Mister Puss, the beautiful Abyssinian cat who just might have the ability to speak—receives a letter from the new rector at St. Alban’s Episcopal Church in her hometown of Dumont, Wisconsin. When Joyce Hibbard requests that Mary fund a project to either restore or rebuild the soon-to-be-condemned St. Alban’s church building, the philanthropist insists that she will only participate if her friend and noted local architect Marson Miles is involved. While Joyce is walking Marson and his husband, Brody Norris—who is also the partner in his architectural firm, Miles & Norris, as well as something of an amateur sleuth—around the property, they come across the body of their new friend, David Lowell, the choir director and organist of St. Alban’s. But who would want the choir director dead? Could it be one of the new people in town: Joyce or her husband-of-convenience, Curtis—a wealthy gay lawyer whom Marson knew in college and who recently asked David on a date? Or Curtis’ friend and former lover, the famous ballet dancer Yevgeny Krymov? With the help of the local sheriff, Thomas Simms, and the preternatural Mister Puss, Brody will have to don his detective coat once again to catch the killer before anyone else drops dead. Craft’s (FlabberGassed, 2018, etc.) prose, with its affectionate digs at gossipy Episcopal parishes and affluent gay culture, is cheery in a way that keeps the novel from ever getting too dark, even with the murderous subject matter. After Joyce, who came to religion late in life (and perhaps not because of God), quotes Philippians at a dinner party, her husband says, “You’re laying it on a bit thick, aren’t you, Poopsie?” The characters are all compellingly odd, operating in a gray area between noble and self-serving that will keep readers guessing at their underlying motives. While the author hardly reinvents the wheel, this cozy setting with its nosy inhabitants makes for a lovely place to spend a few hours trying to figure out whodunit and why.
A satisfying mystery pleasantly told.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-578-52330-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Questover Press
Review Posted Online: July 11, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
If the elusive Pynchon regularly cranked out novels, then this latest addition to his semi-classic oeuvre would be considered an excellent, if flawed, fiction, not as demanding and complex as Gravity's Rainbow, nor as neat and clever as The Crying of Lot 49 and V. As it is, coming 17 years since the last book, it's something of a disappointment.
Yes, it's compulsively funny, full of virtuoso riffs, and trenchant in its anarcho-libertarian social commentary. But there's a missing dimension in this tale of post-Sixties malaise—a sense of characters being more than an accumulation of goofy allusions and weird behavior. And all of its winding, conspiratorially digressive plot adds up to a final moment of apparently unintentional kitsch—a limp scene reuniting a girl and her dog. Built on flashbacks to the 60's, the story reenacts in 1984 the struggles that refuse to disappear. Not politics really, but the sense of solidarity and betrayal that marks both periods for the numerous characters that wander into this fictional vortex. At the center is Frenesi (Free and Easy) Gates, who's anything but. A red-diaper baby and radical film-maker during the rebellion-charged 60's, Frenesi sold her soul to a man in uniform, the quintessential Nixon-Reagan fascist, Brock Vond, a fed whose manic pursuit of lefties and dopers finds him abusing civil rights over three decades. He's motivated not just by innate evil, but by his obsession with Frenesi, whom he sets up as a sting-operation expert protected under the Witness Protection Program. Meanwhile, the venomous Vond sees to it that Frenesi's hippie husband, Zoyd Wheeler, and her daughter, Prairie, are "disappeared" to Vineland, the northern California town where L.A. counterculturalists lick their collective wounds among the redwoods, and bemoan "the heartless power of the scabland garrison state the green free America of their childhoods even then was turning into." Brilliant digressions on Californian left-wing history, the saga of The People's Republic of Rock and Roll, a Mob wedding, and the living dead known as the Thanatoids all come bathed in the clarity of Pynchon's eye-popping language.
Pynchon's latest should prove to the legions of contemporary scribbler-fakers that it isn't enough to reproduce pop-schlock on the page, it needs to be siphoned through the kind of imaginative genius on display everywhere here.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1990
ISBN: 0141180633
Page Count: 385
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1990
PERSPECTIVES
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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