by Neil Jordan ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 25, 2004
Still, Jordan undoubtedly has the skills to turn it into a movie that will be well worth seeing.
The ghost of a murdered woman relives and evaluates her life in this elaborately orchestrated tale from the Irish novelist (The Dream of a Beast, 1989, etc.) and filmmaker (Mona Lisa, The Crying Game, etc.).
Employing a narrative method similar to that of Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones (not to mention Billy Wilder’s film classic Sunset Boulevard), Jordan tells his strange story through the disembodied voice of retired film and theater actress Nina Hardy. It’s a tale that cuts a melodramatic swath through the period 1900–50, beginning with Nina’s dispassionate account of her murder by her childhood friend George, whose unrequited love for her was frustrated by Nina’s close attachment to her brooding half-brother Gregory, a brain-damaged simulacrum of Emily Brontë’s Heathcliff. There are also pronounced echoes of Dickens’s Great Expectations in Nina’s remembrance of growing up in Baltray House, located on an estuary of the River Boyne—to which element Nina will eventually “return” (for George had decapitated her and thrown her headless body into a septic tank that emptied into it). Shade (a nice title, incidentally) exhibits both lyrically precise writing and overstraining for effect. The specific detail with which Nina describes her early years (marked by her vivid imagination and by the foreshadowing —presence of her ill-fated alcoholic governess) and her experience of the movies’ transition from silent films to “talkies” is invariably dramatic and interesting. But it was surely a mistake to credit her “shade” with total godlike omniscience even if this does enable Jordan to create compelling images of the WWI experiences of the two men who figure most importantly in her life and death. There are many beautiful moments here, but the vivid particulars do not consistently cohere.
Still, Jordan undoubtedly has the skills to turn it into a movie that will be well worth seeing.Pub Date: Oct. 25, 2004
ISBN: 1-58234-482-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2004
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by J.A. Jance ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 2, 2019
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
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A convicted killer’s list of five people he wants dead runs the gamut from the wife he’s already had murdered to franchise heroine Ali Reynolds.
Back in the day, women came from all over to consult Santa Clarita fertility specialist Dr. Edward Gilchrist. Many of them left his care happily pregnant, never dreaming that the father of the babies they carried was none other than the physician himself, who donated his own sperm rather than that of the handsome, athletic, disease-free men pictured in his scrapbook. When Alexandra Munsey’s son, Evan, is laid low by the kidney disease he’s inherited from his biological father and she returns to Gilchrist in search of the donor’s medical records, the roof begins to fall in on him. By the time it’s done falling, he’s serving a life sentence in Folsom Prison for commissioning the death of his wife, Dawn, the former nurse and sometime egg donor who’d turned on him. With nothing left to lose, Gilchrist tattoos himself with the initials of five people he blames for his fall: Dawn; Leo Manuel Aurelio, the hit man he’d hired to dispose of her; Kaitlyn Todd, the nurse/receptionist who took Dawn’s place; Alex Munsey, whose search for records upset his apple cart; and Ali Reynolds, the TV reporter who’d helped put Alex in touch with the dozen other women who formed the Progeny Project because their children looked just like hers. No matter that Ali’s been out of both California and the news business for years; Gilchrist and his enablers know that revenge can’t possibly be served too cold. Wonder how far down that list they’ll get before Ali, aided once more by Frigg, the methodical but loose-cannon AI first introduced in Duel to the Death (2018), turns on them?
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how little the boundary-challenged AI, who gets into the case more or less inadvertently, differs from your standard human sidekick with issues.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5101-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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by Lorna Barrett ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 13, 2019
An anodyne visit with Tricia and her friends and enemies hung on a thin mystery.
Too much free time leads a New Hampshire bookseller into yet another case of murder.
Now that Tricia Miles has Pixie Poe and Mr. Everett practically running her bookstore, Haven’t Got a Clue, she finds herself at loose ends. Her wealthy sister, Angelica, who in the guise of Nigela Ricita has invested heavily in making Stoneham a bookish tourist attraction, is entering the amateur competition for the Great Booktown Bake-Off. So Tricia, who’s recently taken up baking as a hobby, decides to join her and spends a lot of time looking for the perfect cupcake recipe. A visit to another bookstore leaves Tricia witnessing a nasty argument between owner Joyce Widman and next-door neighbor Vera Olson over the trimming of tree branches that hang over Joyce’s yard—also overheard by new town police officer Cindy Pearson. After Tricia accepts Joyce’s offer of some produce from her garden, they find Vera skewered by a pitchfork, and when Police Chief Grant Baker arrives, Joyce is his obvious suspect. Ever since Tricia moved to Stoneham, the homicide rate has skyrocketed (Poisoned Pages, 2018, etc.), and her history with Baker is fraught. She’s also become suspicious about the activities at Pets-A-Plenty, the animal shelter where Vera was a dedicated volunteer. Tricia’s offered her expertise to the board, but president Toby Kingston has been less than welcoming. With nothing but baking on her calendar, Tricia has plenty of time to investigate both the murder and her vague suspicions about the shelter. Plenty of small-town friendships and rivalries emerge in her quest for the truth.
An anodyne visit with Tricia and her friends and enemies hung on a thin mystery.Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-9848-0272-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2019
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