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
A kicky, kinky, wildly inventive 21st-century mashup with franker language and a higher body count than Hamlet.
Manic parodist Moore, fresh off a season in 1947 San Francisco (Noir, 2018), returns with a rare gift for Shakespeare fans who think A Midsummer Night’s Dream would be perfect if only it were a little more madcap.
Cast adrift by pirates together with his apprentice, halfwit giant Drool, and Jeff, his barely less intelligent monkey, Pocket of Dog Snogging upon Ouze, jester to the late King Lear, washes ashore in Shakespeare’s Athens, where Cobweb, a squirrel by day and fairy by night, takes him under her wing and other parts. Soon after he encounters Robin Goodfellow (the Puck), jester to shadow king Oberon, and Nick Bottom and the other clueless mechanicals rehearsing Pyramus and Thisby in a nearby forest before they present it in celebration of the wedding of Theseus, Duke of Athens, to Hippolyta, the captive Amazon queen who’s captured his heart, Pocket (The Serpent of Venice, 2014, etc.) finds Robin fatally shot by an arrow. Suspected briefly of the murder himself, he’s commissioned, first by Hippolyta, then by the unwitting Theseus, to identify the Puck’s killer. Oh, and Egeus, the Duke’s steward, wants him to find and execute Lysander, who’s run off with Egeus’ daughter, Hermia, instead of marrying Helena, who’s in love with Demetrius. As English majors can attest, a remarkable amount of this madness can already be found in Shakespeare’s play. Moore’s contribution is to amp up the couplings, bawdy language, violence, and metatextual analogies between the royals, the fairies, the mechanicals, his own interloping hero, and any number of other plays by the Bard.
A kicky, kinky, wildly inventive 21st-century mashup with franker language and a higher body count than Hamlet.Pub Date: May 12, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-243402-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
It’s obvious where all this is going, but Box gets you there, in one of most tightly wound tales, with more thrills than a...
Fired after his last colorfully insubordinate outing (The Disappeared, 2018), Wyoming Fish and Game Warden Joe Pickett is back on the job in Twelve Sleep County just in time to follow the trail from a routine misdemeanor to a quartet of hired killers.
Katelyn Hamm, Joe’s counterpart in Shell County, is saddened and angry to see a herd of terrified mule deer fleeing, some to their deaths, from an unregistered drone aircraft that disappears in the direction of Twelve Sleep County. This isn’t the first time locals have spotted the drone, and Katelyn wants Joe to track down its owner. Joe obligingly traces the rogue aircraft to the compound of Bill Hill, who gets him just as furious as Katelyn by freely admitting the offense, crumpling up the citation Joe gives him, refusing to follow him to the sheriff’s office, and assuring Joe that he’ll never have to answer the charge—and that Joe himself will be in trouble if he presses too hard. Trouble promptly arrives in the form of two FBI agents from the nation’s capital who warn first Katelyn, then Joe, off the case, which they consider no big deal compared to the threat against thousands of lives—“maybe tens of thousands….Maybe millions”—they’re handling but refuse to identify. Meanwhile, four professional killers, including a particularly fatal female, are headed to Twelve Sleep County from Arizona, where they’ve just killed their latest target, his wife, and a friend who happened to have stopped by. Squeezed between the feds and the Wolf Pack, a murderous arm of the Sinaloa drug cartel, Joe will himself be targeted, along with Katelyn, the FBI agents, the local sheriff, his wife’s best friend, and his own friend the outlaw falconer Nate Romanowski, for elimination before the killers can move on to their real target.
It’s obvious where all this is going, but Box gets you there, in one of most tightly wound tales, with more thrills than a snowy road on a steep mountain and more authority than the governor of Wyoming.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-53819-6
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Dec. 10, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2019
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