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
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
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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