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BONE TO THE BONE

Shaham, winner of last year's National Jewish Book Award for The Rosendorf Quartet, organizes this ambitious new novel around the figure of a Marxist revolutionary suddenly struggling in his old age to come to terms with his part in the upheavals he has survived. Avigdor Berkov begins clearly enough with the facts of his life. He was born in Czarist Russia, left it for Palestine in the heady 1920's to work in the Labor Brigade, fathered a son on his girlfriend, but returned to Soviet Russia when his leftist positions led to his expulsion from the Brigade. Back in his homeland, he had time to settle down with a wife, Nina, and a daughter, Olga, before Stalin's infernal machine captured him and abandoned him to interrogation, torture, and a long prison term. Now, in 1970, his trip to Olga in Tel Aviv—where he'll see Vera and her son as well—forces him to reconstruct himself, and his justification for choosing political causes over family, friends, and lovers, through a shattered mosaic of memories. As in The Rosendorf Quartet, a series of narratives (here, four notebooks Berkov keeps on his arrival in Israel) dramatize increasingly powerful episodes in the principals' lives without, finally, giving the labyrinth a center. Berkov recalls his hopeful friendship with Crimean utopian Mendel Elkind, his casual betrayal of a harmless Israeli intellectual, his suspicions of the Polish editor whose desire for Nina led him to produce a forged death certificate for Berkov—all the time trying to explain himself in the present to an avid student of the Labor Brigade's infighting, a documentary filmmaker, his dismissive son-in-law, and his companions in the nursing home where he ends up. Despite Shaham's resolute understatement (``It is melodrama which I want to avoid above all,'' Berkov says early on): a memorable portrait of a survivor of himself, a man whose own actions, and whose continuing detachment from them, have branded him as indelibly as the Holocaust scarred its survivors.

Pub Date: Oct. 15, 1993

ISBN: 0-8021-1001-0

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Grove

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1993

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THE POET

Connelly takes a break from his Harry Bosch police novels (The Last Coyote, p. 328, etc.) for something even more intense: a reporter's single-minded pursuit of the serial killer who murdered his twin. Even his buddies in the Denver PD thought Sean McEvoy's shooting in the backseat of his car looked like a classic cop suicide, right clown to the motive: his despondency over his failure to clear the murder of a University of Denver student. But as Sean's twin brother, Jack, of the Rocky Mountain News, notices tiny clues that marked Sean's death as murder, his suspicions about the dying message Sean scrawled inside his fogged windshield—"Out of space. Out of time"—alert him to a series of eerily similar killings stretching from Sarasota to Albuquerque. The pattern, Jack realizes, involves two sets of murders: a series of sex killings of children, and then the executions (duly camouflaged as suicides) of the investigating police officers. Armed with what he's dug up, Jack heads off to Washington, to the Law Enforcement Foundation and the FBI. The real fireworks begin as Jack trades his official silence for an inside role in the investigation, only to find himself shut out of both the case and the story. From then on in, Jack, falling hard for Rachel Walling, the FBI agent in charge of the case, rides his Bureau connections like a bucking bronco—even as one William Gladden, a pedophile picked up on a low-level charge in Santa Monica, schemes to make bail before the police can run his prints through the national computer, then waits with sick patience for his chance at his next victim. The long-awaited confrontation between Jack and Gladden comes at an LA video store; but even afterward, Jack's left with devastating questions about the case. Connelly wrings suspense out of every possible aspect of Jack's obsessive hunt for his brother's killer. Prepare to be played like a violin.

Pub Date: Jan. 15, 1996

ISBN: 0-316-15398-2

Page Count: 440

Publisher: Little, Brown

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1995

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EVA LUNA

Here, after last year's Of Love and Shadows, the tale of a quirky young woman's rise to influence in an unnamed South American country—with a delightful cast of exotic characters, but without the sure-handed plotting and leisurely grace of Allende's first—and best—book, The House of the Spirits (1985). When little Eva Luna's mother dies, the imaginative child is hired out to a string of eccentric families. During one of her periodic bouts of rebellion, she runs away and makes friends with Huberto Naranjo, a slick little street-kid. Years later, when she's in another bind, he finds her a place to stay in the red-light district—with a cheerful madame, La Senora, whose best friend is Melesio, a transvestite cabaret star. Everything's cozy until a new police sergeant takes over the district and disrupts the accepted system of corruption. Melesio drafts a protesting petition and is packed off to prison, and Eva's out on the street. She meets Riad Halabi, a kind Arab merchant with a cleft lip, who takes pity on her and whisks her away to the backwater village of Agua Santa. There, Eva keeps her savior's sulky wife Zulema company. Zulema commits suicide after a failed extramarital romance, and the previously loyal visitors begin to whisper about the relationship between Riad Halabi and Eva. So Eva departs for the capital—where she meets up with Melesio (now known as Mimi), begins an affair with Huberto Naranjo (now a famous rebel leader), and becomes casually involved in the revolutionary movement. Brimming with hothouse color, amply displayed in Allende's mellifluous prose, but the riot of character and incident here is surface effect; and the action—the mishaps of Eva—is toothless and vague. Lively entertainment, then, with little resonance.

Pub Date: Oct. 21, 1988

ISBN: 0241951658

Page Count: -

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1988

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