From Highsmith—veteran investigator of violence and the criminal mind (with, most recently, The Boy Who Followed Ripley and Ripley's Game)—comes a new exploration of, this time, a domestic violence, one whose fuse is lit when Richard Alderman, a stolid, small-town insurance agent, husband to mild-mannered Lois and father to two sons, is "born again." So, no stylish Tom Ripley here, only an average American family cloven asunder by Highsmith's version of fundamentalist fanaticism, aggressiveness and hypocrisy. As the story opens, Richard Alderman's oldest son, Arthur, is graduating from high school, falling in love with girl-next-doorish Maggie, wrestling with notions of values and self-respect, and may be, all in all, a little too good to be true. When his oddly intense 15-year-old brother Robbie has a close brush with death due to a "dangerous fever and strep throat," father Richard prays through the night, lands himself a miracle and turns hyper-devout, not to mention intolerant, anti-evolution, and—most important to Arthur, since he's gotten Maggie pregnant—anti-abortion. Nevertheless, Maggie goes ahead and has an abortion and is later caught (thanks to Robbie's diligence) in Arthur's bedroom; Richard kicks Arthur out and refuses to foot the bill for college. Arthur is self-reliant enough to handle homelessness and to get into the local university, but he gets increasingly uneasy as Robbie grows weirder, obsessively religious, and his mother more timid—even when she learns that her husband has had an affair with one of the "church crowd." Then, kaboom. . .Robbie hears about his dad's dalliance and blows him away with a hunting rifle ("Dad deserved it," he says grimly). Arthur moves back home, mom snaps out of her depression; and soon Robbie's looking forward to being released from juvenile detention and joining the Marines. Who's wrong, who's right in this novel? In true Highsmith fashion, we're left unsure—as well as uncaring, since Arthur's awfully callous and such a humdrum protagonist and Richard such a caricature (the deck's so stacked against him from the word go that the reader doubts the novel's verisimilitude). And though Highsmith builds apprehension like a pro, there's no payoff, just a moral knot too easily untied or too unengaging to labor over.
Pub Date: Sept. 21, 1985
ISBN: 0393322432
Page Count: 348
Publisher: Mysterious Press
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1985
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
A smoothly written contemporary caper paired with a murder mystery and a little meet-the-Jetsons futurism. No one does...
Written under her real name and her pseudonym, two books in one from megaselling Roberts/Robb.
Book one: Laine Tavish, gorgeous redhead and owner of a small-town antique store, isn’t about to tell the cops that she knew the old man who was hit by a car right outside her shop. Just before he took his dying breath, she recognized Willy Young, partner in crime to Big Jack O’Hara, her father. Their biggest heist: millions of dollars in hot diamonds. Her father went to prison, but not Willy, whose last words were “left it for you.” What did he leave—and where? Enter Max Gannon, insurance investigator and all-around stud, with thick, wavy, run-your-fingers-through-it hair, tawny eyes that remind Laine of a tiger, and a delicious Georgia drawl. He beds Laine pronto, and they solve the case. But some of the diamonds are still missing. . . . Book two: it’s 50 years later, and New York traffic is slower than ever: just try getting a helicab on a rainy day. But Samantha Gannon, author of a bestseller called Hot Rocks based on her grandparents’ experiences in the long-ago case, eventually makes it home from the airport to find her house-sitter Andrea dead, throat cut. Another investigation begins, spearheaded by Eve Dallas, a tough-talking but very appealing New York cop married to Roarke, a rich, eccentric genius who just barely manages to stay on the right side of the law. Is the murderer after the rest of the diamonds? And is he or she related to the master thief who betrayed Samantha’s great-grandfather? There are more burning questions, and Eve wants answers—but, first, get Central on the telelink and program the Autochef for pastrami on rye.
A smoothly written contemporary caper paired with a murder mystery and a little meet-the-Jetsons futurism. No one does Suspense Lite better than Nora.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-399-15106-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2003
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