The directors of London's venerable Peverell Press think that the suicide of senior editor Sonia Clements in the archive room of the firm's palatial offices in Innocent House is the last and most shocking episode in a series of disruptions to their business: some lost illustrations, a manuscript maliciously altered in proof, an unsigned note to one of the current authors pointing out that two other Peverell authors have recently died. But their troubles have only begun, as they learn when they open the office to discover the body of managing director Gerard Etienne dead of carbon monoxide poisoning. The death would look accidental if someone hadn't pried Etienne's dead jaws open and stuck inside the head of a stuffed snake, an office mascot called Hissing Sid, and the first question Commander Adam Dalgliesh (Devices and Desires, 1990, etc.) answers with his accustomed brilliance is what the snake is doing there. For the rest, the tale is little more than a series of interrogations, in James's most ceremonious style, of the surviving directors and the Peverell staff, designed to ferret out motives (there are many, ranging from professional revenge to the cash nexus) and alibis (everybody offers one); yet long before the hair-raising, if not entirely original, climax, you'll be enraptured by James's uncanny penetration into even the most minor functionaries, who live on the page with a fierce intensity even deeper than the mystery at Innocent House. One of James's most successful meldings of the old-fashioned whodunit onto the novel of character—a Middlemarch of the classic detective story.
Pub Date: Feb. 7, 1995
ISBN: 0-679-43889-0
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1994
Looks like Neal Carey, the peripatetic agent of that free- lance justice troop Friends of the Family, will never get back to New York to write his dissertation on Tobias Smollett. This time he's sprung from three years in a Chinese monastery (The Trail to Buddha's Mirror, 1992) only to be sent undercover as a ranch-hand in the Nevada plains to scout out the Sons of Seth, a white- supremacist flock that's his best hope for locating two-year-old Cody McCall, snatched from his Hollywood mother during a paternal weekend. Neal settles in deep, of course, and his ritual ordeals- -having to sell out the rancher who took him in, breaking off his romance with tough schoolmarm Karen Hawley, going up against rotten-apple Cal Strekker, getting ordered to kill his Friendly mentor Joe Graham—are as predictable as the trademark dose of mysticism as the bodies pile up, and as the certainty that when the dust settles, Neal won't be back at school. Winslow's Aryan crazies don't have the threatening solidity of Stephen Greenleaf's (Southern Cross, p. 1102 ), but Neal's latest adventure is full of entertaining derring-do.
Pub Date: Nov. 16, 1993
ISBN: 0-312-09934-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1993
O'Brien proves to be the Oliver Stone of literature, reiterating the same Vietnam stories endlessly without adding any insight. Politician John Wade has just lost an election, and he and his wife, Kathy, have retired to a lakeside cabin to plan their future when she suddenly disappears. O'Brien manages to stretch out this simple premise by sticking in chapters consisting of quotes from various sources (both actual and fictional) that relate to John and Kathy. An unnamed author — an irritating device that recalls the better-handled but still imperfect "Tim O'Brien" narrator of The Things They Carried (1990) — also includes lengthy footnotes about his own experiences in Vietnam. While the sections covering John in the third person are dry, these first-person footnotes are unbearable. O'Brien uses a coy tone (it's as though he's constantly whispering "Ooooh, spooky!"), but there is no suspense: The reader is acquainted with Kathy for only a few pages before her disappearance, so it's impossible to work up any interest in her fate. The same could be said of John, even though he is the focus of the book. Flashbacks and quotes reveal that John was present at the infamous Thuan Yen massacre (for those too thick-headed to understand the connection to My Lai, O'Brien includes numerous real-life references). The symbolism here is beyond cloying. As a child John liked to perform magic tricks, and he was subsequently nicknamed "Sorcerer" by his fellow soldiers — he could make things disappear, get it? John has been troubled for some time. He used to spy on Kathy when they were in college, and his father's habit of calling the chubby boy "Jiggling John" apparently wounded him. All of this is awkwardly uncovered through a pretentious structure that cannot disguise the fact that there is no story here. Sinks like a stone.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1994
ISBN: 061870986X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1994
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