A promising but relentlessly lascivious detective tale.
In Lubow’s novel set in the late 1980s, a dissatisfied advertising executive finds himself investigating a missing-person case.
Thirty-five-year-old Benjamin Franklin Green of Chicago ad agency Swift, Pope & Fielding has masterminded successful campaigns for such products as Granny Annie’s soup, packaged in jars (“one simple word in bold, tightly packed letters. UNCANNY”). But after accidentally falling through a paneled conference room wall during a meeting, an embarrassed Ben leaves the building, leaves the city, and hops a plane to Los Angeles. He decides to write a coffee-table book comparing advertising images to reality, and he visits an old colleague, Andrew Beale Cole, and his wife to tell them all about it. While Ben is there, the Coles receive a phone call from someone claiming to have kidnapped their 21-year-old daughter, Abby. Cole asks Ben to travel to Colorado, where Abby disappeared, and help a private investigator track his daughter down. He believes that “idea man” Ben will “find a new slant. A way to solve it.” Before long, the Chicagoan is entangled in an adventure involving falconry, a gun-wielding loner nicknamed Rambo, crossbow-carrying poachers, and a suspenseful trek through the Colorado wilderness. Amateur ad-exec detectives are certainly a rarity in the genre, and Lubow does a fine job of establishing Ben’s analytical mind and off-kilter perspective. It results in striking images, even of mundane actions: “She waved at him, not with the whole hand, just her fingers lined up like little people, all bending at the waist, up down, up down.” The mystery itself takes lively detours and has an unexpected resolution. However, the novel is dragged down by the fact that Ben is incapable of interacting with women without sleazily gauging their sexual attractiveness. The female characters feel underdeveloped, as well; one woman’s most distinctive feature is that she spends a good portion of the book “naked but for a knife belt,” and another key character is topless when Ben first sees her; he notes “how her bosom shook when she talked…and didn’t stop after she’d stopped, but kept on jiggling.”
A promising but relentlessly lascivious detective tale.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Manuscript
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
A vivid, exciting page-turner from one of our most interesting authors of historical fiction.
When a man accused of rape turns up dead, an Early American town seeks justice amid rumors and controversy.
Lawhon’s fifth work of historical fiction is inspired by the true story and diaries of midwife Martha Ballard of Hallowell, Maine, a character she brings to life brilliantly here. As Martha tells her patient in an opening chapter set in 1789, “You need not fear….In all my years attending women in childbirth, I have never lost a mother.” This track record grows in numerous compelling scenes of labor and delivery, particularly one in which Martha has to clean up after the mistakes of a pompous doctor educated at Harvard, one of her nemeses in a town that roils with gossip and disrespect for women’s abilities. Supposedly, the only time a midwife can testify in court is regarding paternity when a woman gives birth out of wedlock—but Martha also takes the witness stand in the rape case against a dead man named Joshua Burgess and his living friend Col. Joseph North, whose role as judge in local court proceedings has made the victim, Rebecca Foster, reluctant to make her complaint public. Further complications are numerous: North has control over the Ballard family's lease on their property; Rebecca is carrying the child of one of her rapists; Martha’s son was seen fighting with Joshua Burgess on the day of his death. Lawhon weaves all this into a richly satisfying drama that moves suspensefully between childbed, courtroom, and the banks of the Kennebec River. The undimmed romance between 40-something Martha and her husband, Ephraim, adds a racy flair to the proceedings. Knowing how rare the quality of their relationship is sharpens the intensity of Martha’s gaze as she watches the romantic lives of her grown children unfold. As she did with Nancy Wake in Code Name Hélène (2020), Lawhon creates a stirring portrait of a real-life heroine and, as in all her books, includes an endnote with detailed background.
A vivid, exciting page-turner from one of our most interesting authors of historical fiction.Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9780385546874
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Aug. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2023
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