As usual, the strength of Longworth's tale is its depiction of the good life in Provence, with the detection providing an...
Strange doings at a country home in Provence.
Examining magistrate Antoine Verlaque (The Curse of La Fontaine, 2017, etc.) and his bride, Marine Bonnet, have a new neighbor. Goncourt prizewinner Valère Barbier has moved into La Bastide Blanche, a formidable home in Puyloubier just outside Aix—and coincidentally, adjacent to the vineyard owned by Hélène, wife of Bruno Paulik, Verlaque’s commissaire. The Pauliks soon befriend the writer, who’s entranced by their talented young daughter, Léa. They invite him to a lovely meal of grilled lamb chops and sausages, accompanied of course by some of Hélène’s fine wine, and Barbier reciprocates to the best of his ability given that his electricity isn’t yet turned on and his kitchen is at the mercy of his flighty housekeeper, Sandrine Matton. Soon he’s smoking at Antoine’s cigar club and chatting cozily with Marine. But Valère’s welcome by his Aixoise neighbors is spoiled by the arrival of his Parisian friends. Fellow writer and childhood frenemy Michèle Baudouin shows up, shouting at her Japanese publisher over her cellphone. Michèle’s lazy lout of a son arrives, then promptly disappears. Even more unnerving, voices call out to Valère in his sleep. Unseen hands shake his shoulder. The locals, long convinced that the bastide is haunted, are unsurprised. But Antoine, suspecting that Barbier’s troubles may be connected to the death of his wife years ago in a boating accident, resolves to reopen the long-cold case. Longworth’s latest, told in part as a memoir and in part as a straightforward mystery, gains nothing by its fragmentation.
As usual, the strength of Longworth's tale is its depiction of the good life in Provence, with the detection providing an excuse for some splendid meals.Pub Date: April 3, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-14-313142-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Great storytelling, a quirky hero, and a quirkier plot make this a winner for adventure fans.
FBI Special Agent Aloysius Pendergast finds evil afoot in his latest action-filled adventure (Verses for the Dead, 2018, etc.).
Imagine Florida beachcombers’ shock when they discover a shoe with a severed foot inside. Soon they see dozens more feet, all in identical shoes, bobbing toward the beach. Police and FBI ultimately count more than a hundred of them washing up on Sanibel and Captiva Islands' tranquil shores. Pendergast teams up with the junior Special Agent Armstrong Coldmoon to investigate this strange phenomenon. Oceanographers use a supercomputer to analyze Gulf currents and attempt to determine where the feet entered the ocean. Were they dumped off a ship or an island? Does each one represent a homicide? Analysts examine chemical residues and pollen, even the angle of each foot’s amputation, but the puzzle defies all explanation. Attention focuses on Cuba, where “something terrible was happening” in front of a coastal prison, and on China, the apparent source of the shoes. The clever plot is “a most baffling case indeed” for the brilliant Pendergast, but it’s the type of problem he thrives on. He’s hardly a stereotypical FBI agent, given for example his lemon-colored silk suit, his Panama hat, and his legendary insistence on working alone—until now. Pendergast rarely blinks—perhaps, someone surmises, he’s part reptile. But equally odd is Constance Greene, his “extraordinarily beautiful,” smart, and sarcastic young “ward” who has “eyes that had seen everything and, as a result, were surprised by nothing.” Coldmoon is more down to earth: part Lakota, part Italian, and “every inch a Fed.” Add in murderous drug dealers, an intrepid newspaper reporter, coyotes crossing the U.S.–Mexico border, and a pissed-off wannabe graphic novelist, and you have a thoroughly entertaining cast of characters. There is plenty of suspense, and the action gets bloody.
Great storytelling, a quirky hero, and a quirkier plot make this a winner for adventure fans.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5387-4725-4
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
Elliptical and often oracular, but also remarkably penetrating and humane. The most illuminating analogies are not to other...
A prior’s murder takes Quebec’s Chief Inspector Armand Gamache and his sidekick, Inspector Jean-Guy Beauvoir, inside the walls of the monastery of Saint-Gilbert-Entre-les-Loupes.
The Gilbertine order, long extinct except for the two dozen brothers who live on an island apart from the rest of the world, enforces silence on its members. In the absence of speech, a raised eyebrow or averted gaze can speak intense hostility. Now someone has found a new way to communicate such hostility: by bashing Frère Mathieu, the monastery’s choirmaster and prior, over the head. Gamache and Beauvoir soon find that the order is devoted heart and soul to Gregorian chant; that its abbot, Dom Philippe, has recruited its members from among the ranks of other orders for their piety, their musical abilities and a necessary range of domestic and maintenance skills; and that an otherworldly recording the brothers had recently made of Gregorian chants has sharply polarized the community between the prior’s men, who want to exploit their unexpected success by making another recording and speaking more widely of their vocation, and the abbot’s men, who greet the prospect of a more open and worldly community with horror. Nor are conflicts limited to the holy suspects. Gamache, Beauvoir and Sûreté Chief Superintendent Sylvain Françoeur, arriving unexpectedly and unwelcome, tangle over the proper way to conduct the investigation, the responsibility for the collateral damage in Gamache’s last case (A Trick of the Light, 2011, etc.), and Beauvoir’s loyalty to his two chiefs and himself in ways quite as violent as any their hosts can provide.
Elliptical and often oracular, but also remarkably penetrating and humane. The most illuminating analogies are not to other contemporary detective fiction but to The Name of the Rose and Murder in the Cathedral.Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-312-65546-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: July 21, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2012
BOOK TO SCREEN
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