A crime tale with a fierce, flawed heroine who surmounts plenty of perils and a few choice men.
In this sequel, a New Yorker with a past might not have a future after a vagrant’s gift puts her in mortal danger.
“What the hell do you wear to a funeral for a homeless guy?” Charley Anderson asks herself in the novel’s first sentence, immediately clueing readers to the main character’s irreverent attitude. An Upper East Sider, Metropolitan Museum of Art Board member, and multimillionaire, 40-year-old Charley suffers physical and emotional scars from a horrifying accident years earlier. Not to the manor born, Charley feels more comfortable talking to her doorman Carlton and Ben Williams, the homeless man always stationed outside her high-rise, than to the building’s residents. Upon learning of Ben’s death, Charley claims his body, pays for his burial (she’s the only gravesite visitor), and learns he left instructions to give her an envelope containing a pencil-written partial address, a key, remnants of a checkbook, and a girl’s faded photograph. Following the interment, Charley returns home to find a letter saying no harm will come to her if she turns over the contents of Ben’s envelope to a P.O. box. Soon Carlton, who had ties to the threatening letter, is found dead, his body tortured. A race ensues to find the lock that Ben’s key fits, the girl in his pocketed photo, and the culprit who killed Carlton before harm comes to Charley. Her chauffer, Jeff Jackson; private investigator Nash Pope and his team; and banker Joe Turner offer their assistance in keeping Charley safe and solving the mystery of why the contents of Ben’s envelope were cause for murder. (Joe also helps out in the bedroom.) Accounts of Met fundraising and artist name-dropping enrich Long’s (Scars, 2018) thriller. Representatives of various ages, ethnic backgrounds, social strata, and sexual preferences form a tapestry not unexpected in New York City but welcome in a novel. The author organically inserts revelations of Charley’s backstory from the series’ origin book. But the torture scenes are gratuitous, even if lithe, blond Charley, who can blind a man “with her bare hands,” is the one dealing out the pain. Believable dialogue and occasional humor pepper the narrative. And descriptions can be compelling: “She projected authority that made whoever sat in the facing chair feel extremely small.”
A crime tale with a fierce, flawed heroine who surmounts plenty of perils and a few choice men.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9991810-6-5
Page Count: 204
Publisher: Yellow City Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 31, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
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
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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