Supercharged fallout from a con man's ingenious plot to fake his own death and take off with the loot he's socked away—a stash that attracts other get-rich-quick types like sharks sniffing blood. Since he's always known when the bank officer he rolled over on for making him a shady $2 million loan will get out of jail and come looking for him, Bobby Swift's had a long time to make his plans. He's transferred the money safely offshore, practiced shallow breathing, and planted stories about his father dying of heart failure. Now, with the help of a benighted local physician and a corruptible undertaker, he's ready to play dead on Blueberry Blossom Night. The plan calls for him to suffer a heart attack in his exercise room, lie in an open casket in Eliot Wicker's funeral home, and get buried with enough compressed oxygen for five hours before his trusted wife Noel digs him up. But Bobby doesn't reckon with Noel's siren charms, which work like a machine gun set on full automatic, and soon half of Gravity, Maine, is in the picture, all with their own agendas. Wicker, with one eye on Noel and the other on the money, ends up taking Bobby's place in his coffin. Bobby's friend Sal Erickson, tumbling off the wagon, becomes convinced that he's somehow been involved in digging up Bobby's corpse and killing Wicker. Sal's wife Iris throws him out of the house and into the tireless arms of Noel. Iris's brother Jerry, not content with the misery he's already made of Iris's life, decides to blackmail Noel with what he knows about Bobby's death and plunges his worthless self and his relatives into more trouble than he can imagine. The core of the story is the old, old one of a decent man stretched to his limits between two women, but Kimball (Firewater Pond, 1985) plots far more generously than any noir writer. The result is an edgy delight, with something for everyone but the luckless cross-plotters.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-380-97305-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Avon/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1996
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
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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