A contemplative representation of the public attitude and cultural atmosphere in the wake of 9/11.
A playwright’s debut novel examines the relationships among strangers brought together by a New York City coffeehouse.
Four months after the 9/11 attacks, Habib el Kader is woken from a recurring nightmare by a phone call from his boss, Jack Healy. Healy delivers the disorienting news that someone has broken into their cafe and stolen the cash box. With little to work from and despite staff testimony to the contrary, the police clearly suspect Habib. Meanwhile, the robbery has the customers speculating and tensions brewing. The narrative viewpoint alternates among various characters, encompassing several patrons and staff members but focusing primarily on the two managers, Habib and David Goldman. Habib is a Muslim father of three whose professional goal is to buy The Coffee Connection from Healy. David is an Israeli former law student struggling to find direction in life as he debates proposing to his girlfriend. The two peacefully coexist, respecting but not fully understanding each other. In addition to the staff, Simmons quickly introduces a robust cast of coffeehouse customers. Examples include a hotheaded political extremist, a thoughtful but obsessive scholar, a pair of aspiring Broadway stars, and a collection of middle-aged schoolteachers who refer to themselves as the Kaffeeklatsch. Although the large cast offers plenty of opportunities for intriguing interpersonal dynamics, it takes a certain amount of effort to keep the various characters from blurring together. Interspersed between the chapters are excerpts from The Almost Complete History of Coffee, an exhaustive research project that dominates the life of one of the patrons. The author’s representation of the beverage is very romantic. The History proclaims that “Coffee has bound men together and torn them apart. It has soothed men’s soul and stimulated their minds. It has liberated some people and brought others to bondage.” While the plot may not be very energetic, the subtlety with which Simmons reveals the characters’ inclinations and biases proves her to be a delicate and perceptive writer.
A contemplative representation of the public attitude and cultural atmosphere in the wake of 9/11.Pub Date: April 30, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-64378-219-5
Page Count: 222
Publisher: Austin Macauley
Review Posted Online: Jan. 15, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Irritatingly trite woman-in-periler from lawyer-turned-novelist Baldacci. Moving away from the White House and the white-shoe Washington law firms of his previous bestsellers (Absolute Power, 1996; Total Control, 1997), Baldacci comes up with LuAnn Tyler, a spunky, impossibly beautiful, white-trash truck stop waitress with a no-good husband and a terminally cute infant daughter in tow. Some months after the birth of Lisa, LuAnn gets a phone call summoning her to a make-shift office in an unrented storefront of the local shopping mall. There, she gets a Faustian offer from a Mr. Jackson, a monomaniacal, cross-dressing manipulator who apparently knows the winning numbers in the national lottery before the numbers are drawn. It seems that LuAnn fits the media profile of what a lottery winner should be—poor, undereducated but proud—and if she's willing to buy the right ticket at the right time and transfer most of her winnings to Jackson, she'll be able to retire in luxury. Jackson fails to inform her, however, that if she refuses his offer, he'll have her killed. Before that can happen, as luck would have it, LuAnn barely escapes death when one of husband Duane's drug deals goes bad. She hops on a first-class Amtrak sleeper to Manhattan with a hired executioner in pursuit. But executioner Charlie, one of Jackson's paid handlers, can't help but hear wedding bells when he sees LuAnn cooing with her daughter. Alas, a winning $100- million lottery drawing complicates things. Jackson spirits LuAnn and Lisa away to Sweden, with Charlie in pursuit. Never fear. Not only will LuAnn escape a series of increasingly violent predicaments, but she'll also outwit Jackson, pay an enormous tax bill to the IRS, and have enough left over to honeymoon in Switzerland. Too preposterous to work as feminine wish-fulfillment, too formulaic to be suspenseful. (Book-of-the-Month Club main selection)
Pub Date: Dec. 2, 1997
ISBN: 0-446-52259-7
Page Count: 528
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1997
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