A thoroughly entertaining, character-driven mystery starring a relatable, no-nonsense New Yorker.
The inaugural adventure of a perky, plucky aspiring screenwriter and secret sleuth.
In this first installment in a planned mystery series, Manhattan author Good (How to Love a Difficult Man, 1987) introduces 30-something Melanie Deming, an “overly zealous health nut” and writer who also occasionally solves crimes in her Upper West Side neighborhood. She looks into the murder of the local playground caretaker—former pro-boxer Ralph Duvet—after she discovers him, apparently bludgeoned to death, in the clubhouse. In between counting her daily steps and tending to her relationships with her food-writer husband, Daniel, and her 9-year-old daughter, Chloe, she looks for clues. Her search leads her to a homeless encampment, a man named Shorty, and Ralph’s shady ex-wife, Nadine Duvet. She also meets a handsome local journalist named Devon McIntire. The plot thickens when a second victim turns up, and it’s revealed that Ralph consumed a cyanide- and arsenic-laced cupcake before he was beaten. As a result, commercial baker Nadine emerges as a prime suspect, and further developments, including a robbery, blackmail, and the involvement of a brutal boxer named Andreas Martines, bring the amateur sleuth deeper into the mystery—much to the ire of annoyed New York City police detectives Brown and Levano. Plenty of colorful, well-drawn peripheral characters make appearances, such as Melanie’s best friend Rebecca, who’s going through marital woes, and a gaggle of bickering private school mothers with names such as “Buffy, Bia, and Fawn.” Good has a knack for spinning humor into her characterizations, and her experience as a “dedicated student of herbs and supplements” shines through in Melanie’s excessive health-food awareness. Melanie is also never shy about providing descriptions and sharp opinions. The mystery’s resolution is smoothly handled, with a few highly effective plot twists along the way. Overall, the novel offers just the right balance of mystery, familial warmth, and clever banter, and it’s smooth, lighthearted fun for those who enjoy a little sarcasm in their whodunits. However, it also touches on themes of class and social status and on the unmet desires of urban housewives.
A thoroughly entertaining, character-driven mystery starring a relatable, no-nonsense New Yorker.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-62420-445-6
Page Count: 235
Publisher: Rogue Phoenix Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 1, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
APPRECIATIONS
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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