A usually reliable and best-selling author (The General's Daughter, 1992, etc.) comes a-cropper with this tale of star-crossed lovers who finally meet again after a quarter century and then must deal with her psychotic husband, the sheriff and de facto dictator of their Ohio hometown. Such a story requires that the individuals involved seem likely to have held onto their youthful romance into middle age. When one, Keith Landry, is an exintelligence operative with the National Security Council, a man competent and experienced enough to have the president of the United States request his return to government service in the White House, such emotional gridlock seems pretty far-fetched. And when the other, Annie Prentis Baxter, has married the town psychopath and remained an apparently willing victim of her own stupid choice for more than 20 years, one must wonder what exactly it is about this woman that has kept Landry captivated. Readers are left to hope that DeMille's reputation for accomplished storytelling and the ability to create memorable characters will save the day. No such luck. This is pure (and unbelievable) melodrama with a stock cast: farmers who are almost actively unsophisticated (Landry's elderly aunt is absolutely baffled by a bottle of red wine), a kindly and understanding old preacher, the town drunk who is a Vietnam veteran and one of the sheriff's prime victims, and so forth. (There is a disdain for Middle America that ranges from implicit to overt throughout these pages.) Even those who fall outside the Spencerville paradigm , Landry's former high school pal and his wife, are clichÇs of another sort: unreconstructed '60s peaceniks: They turn out to have no real role to play in the story. Only Landry's ex-boss from Washington is even vaguely interesting (and his role is essentially that of deus ex machina). Some tension in the final pages, but too little, too late. Very disappointing. (Book-of-the-Month Club main selection; author tour)
Pub Date: Oct. 12, 1994
ISBN: 0-446-51505-1
Page Count: 464
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1994
Fun to read, as always with Moriarty's books, but try not to think about it or it will stop making sense.
Nine people gather at a luxurious health resort in the Australian bushland. Will they have sex, fall in love, get killed, or maybe just lose weight?
Moriarty (Truly Madly Guilty, 2014, etc.) is known for darkly humorous novels set in the suburbs of Sydney—though her most famous book, Big Little Lies (2014), has been transported to Monterey, California, by Reese Witherspoon's HBO series. Her new novel moves away from the lives of prosperous parents to introduce a more eclectic group of people who've signed up for a 10-day retreat at Tranquillium House, a remote spa run by the messianic Masha, "an extraordinary-looking woman. A supermodel. An Olympic athlete. At least six feet tall, with corpse-like white skin and green eyes so striking and huge they were almost alien-like." This was the moment when the guests should probably have fled, but they all decided to stay (perhaps because their hefty payments were nonrefundable?). The book's title is slightly misleading, since not all the guests are strangers to each other. There are two family groups: Ben and Jessica Chandler, a young couple whose relationship broke down after they won the lottery, and the Marconis, Napolean and Heather and their 20-year-old daughter, Zoe, who are trying to recover after the death of Zoe's twin brother, Zach. Carmel Schneider is a divorced housewife who wants to get her mojo back, Lars Lee is an abnormally handsome divorce lawyer who's addicted to spas, and Tony Hogburn is a former professional footballer who wants to get back into shape. Though all these people have their own chapters, the main character is Frances Welty, a romance writer who needs a pick-me-up after having had her latest novel rejected and having been taken in by an internet scam—she fell in love with a man she met on Facebook and sent money to help his (nonexistent) son, who'd been in a (nonexistent) car accident. How humiliating for a writer to fall for a fictional person, Frances thinks, in her characteristically wry way. When the guests arrive, they're given blood tests (why?) and told they're going to start off with a five-day "noble silence" in which they're not even supposed to make eye contact with each other. As you can imagine, something fishy is going on, and while Moriarty displays her usual humor and Frances in particular is an appealing character, it's all a bit ridiculous.
Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-250-06982-5
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 14, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2018
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
Second tense, tightly wound tangle of a case for Hieronymous Bosch (The Black Echo, 1991). This time out, the LAPD homicide cop, who's been exiled to Hollywood Division for his bumptious behavior, sniffs out the bloody trail of the designer drug "black ice." Connelly (who covers crime for the Los Angeles Times) again flexes his knowledge of cop ways—and of cop-novel cliches. Cast from the hoary mold of the maverick cop, Bosch pushes his way onto the story's core case—the apparent suicide of a narc—despite warnings by top brass to lay off. Meanwhile, Bosch's boss, a prototypical pencil-pushing bureaucrat hoping to close out a majority of Hollywood's murder cases by New Year's Day, a week hence, assigns the detective a pile of open cases belonging to a useless drunk, Lou Porter. One of the cases, the slaying of an unidentified Hispanic, seems to tie in to the death of the narc, which Bosch begins to read as murder stemming from the narc's dirty involvement in black ice. When Porter is murdered shortly after Bosch speaks to him, and then the detective's love affair with an ambitious pathologist crashes, Bosch decides to head for Mexico, where clues to all three murders point. There, the well-oiled, ten- gear narrative really picks up speed as Bosch duels with corrupt cops; attends the bullfights; breaks into a fly-breeding lab that's the distribution center for Mexico's black-ice kingpin; and takes part in a raid on the kingpin's ranch that concludes with Bosch waving his jacket like a matador's cape at a killer bull on the rampage. But the kingpin escapes, leading to a not wholly unexpected twist—and to a touching assignation with the dead narc's widow. Expertly told, and involving enough—but lacking the sheer artistry and heart-clutching thrills of, say, David Lindsay's comparable Stuart Haydon series (Body of Evidence, etc.).
Pub Date: June 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-316-15382-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1993
BOOK TO SCREEN
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