Readers may guess the killer before the big reveal, but they’ll also find that the journey is just as enjoyable as the...
A middle-aged private investigator looks for romance—and a murderer—among the moneyed in this mystery novel.
In Danforth’s (Delilah, 2016, etc.) new series installment about detective Ronnie Lake, the born-to-money but down-to-earth protagonist attends Win and Marilyn Watson’s elegant party. Imported cars fill the driveway, attendees are draped in cashmere—and then a thief falls from a second-story after being shot. Ronnie immediately stops looking for a “devastatingly handsome” party guest, wealthy widower Jamie Gordon, and turns her attention to the crumpled cat burglar, who gasps the phrase, “The book,” before dying with Marilyn’s diamond choker in his pocket. But was the necklace really what he was after? After hearing a dog barking in the nearby woods, Ronnie investigates and finds a Jack Russell tied to a branch. The newly professional PI traces the canine to one Casey Whitmore, the deceased burglar, who worked at Alessandro Rare Books. That shop’s owner, stunning Katya Alessandro, threw a drink in Win’s face and left the Watsons’ party shortly before Whitmore’s body came crashing down. Alessandro’s other employee, young Sally Richards, also seems suspicious, particularly in her behavior concerning a rare copy of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. And where was Jamie, anyway, just prior to Whitmore’s fall? In addition to plenty of intrigue and a whiff of scandal, Danforth offers readers lots of engaging information on collectors’ books, rare coins, and Birkin bags. Readers of a certain generation may also feel nostalgic as songs by such artists as the Beach Boys and Sade serve as the soundtrack while Ronnie traipses from parties to polo matches in her red Mustang ragtop. Overall, the mystery isn’t too difficult to figure out, but the writing is breezy in tone and characters are unconventional—particularly Ronnie, who has a black belt in aikido, looks great in a sleeveless dress, and hasn’t succumbed to many challenges in her life, including a divorce and a son’s recent death in Afghanistan.
Readers may guess the killer before the big reveal, but they’ll also find that the journey is just as enjoyable as the destination.Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-946403-00-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Pancora Press
Review Posted Online: April 19, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2017
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
Once again, Hilderbrand displays her gift for making us care most about her least likable characters.
Hilderbrand’s latest cautionary tale exposes the toxic—and hilarious—impact of gossip on even the most sophisticated of islands.
Eddie and Grace Pancik are known for their beautiful Nantucket home and grounds, financed with the profits from Eddie’s thriving real estate company (thriving before the crash of 2008, that is). Grace raises pedigreed hens and, with the help of hunky landscape architect Benton Coe, has achieved a lush paradise of fowl-friendly foliage. The Panciks’ teenage girls, Allegra and Hope, suffer invidious comparisons of their looks and sex appeal, although they're identical twins. The Panciks’ friends the Llewellyns (Madeline, a blocked novelist, and her airline-pilot husband, Trevor) invested $50,000, the lion’s share of Madeline’s last advance, in Eddie’s latest development. But Madeline, hard-pressed to come up with catalog copy, much less a new novel, is living in increasingly straightened circumstances, at least by Nantucket standards: she can only afford $2,000 per month on the apartment she rents in desperate hope that “a room of her own” will prime the creative pump. Construction on Eddie’s spec houses has stalled, thanks to the aforementioned crash. Grace, who has been nursing a crush on Benton for some time, gives in and a torrid affair ensues, which she ill-advisedly confides to Madeline after too many glasses of Screaming Eagle. With her agent and publisher dropping dire hints about clawing back her advance and Eddie “temporarily” unable to return the 50K, what’s a writer to do but to appropriate Grace’s adultery as fictional fodder? When Eddie is seen entering her apartment (to ask why she rented from a rival realtor), rumors spread about him and Madeline, and after the rival realtor sneaks a look at Madeline’s rough draft (which New York is hotly anticipating as “the Playboy Channel meets HGTV”), the island threatens to implode with prurient snark. No one is spared, not even Hilderbrand herself, “that other Nantucket novelist,” nor this magazine, “the notoriously cranky Kirkus.”
Once again, Hilderbrand displays her gift for making us care most about her least likable characters.Pub Date: June 16, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-316-33452-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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