Except for a superfluity of sentences like `He took her there on the floor, with swift, rough lust,` this is quality hokum,...
Hot-blooded sex, hoodoo, and homicide in the Queen City (during the Roaring Twenties) are the savory ingredients of this turbulent potboiler concocted by The Romance Writer Otherwise Known as Penelope Williamson.
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil it isn't, despite a bubbling gumbo of partial echoes and incidental resemblances. It all begins when prominent New Orleans criminal lawyer Charles St. Claire is found hacked to death in a converted `slave shack` not far from his luxurious home. All evidence points to the grieving widow, gorgeous movie vixen Remy Lelourie—who's the former lover of weary veteran police detective Daman Rourke, a widower currently involved with the widow of their mutual childhood friend, a slain cop. You think that's complicated? Another corpse turns up nearby; circumstantial evidence suggesting a mob hit puts `Day` Rourke in the face of another old comrade, Chicago (and Al Capone)–connected bootlegger Casey Maguire. Day's investigation predictably takes him through the city's many colorful social and criminal levels, and rapidly branches out to include Remy's resentful sister Belle (deeply implicated in a Lelourie family secret pertaining to both Charles St. Claire and his late brother Julius); `high-yeller` beauty Lucille Durand, whose husband LeRoy, a onetime prizefighter, is doing time for a murder he probably didn't commit; St. Claire's suave (and evasive) law partner Jean Louis Armande; reformed `tantan macoute` and specialist in `the black arts` Mamma Rae; and prudent police commissioner (and Day's former father-in-law) Weldon Carrigan. In New Awlins, you see, everybody's related to everybody else—if not by blood, then as lovers or confederates: a fact whose several interlocking proofs dovetail neatly together for this enjoyably strident novel's deft resolution.
Except for a superfluity of sentences like `He took her there on the floor, with swift, rough lust,` this is quality hokum, aided immeasurably by outrageously melodramatic characters and amusingly hard-bitten dialogue. Don't miss the miniseries.Pub Date: June 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-446-52154-X
Page Count: 432
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2000
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
Genetically engineered dinosaurs run amok in Crichton's new, vastly entertaining science thriller. From the introduction alone—a classically Crichton-clear discussion of the implications of biotechnological research—it's evident that the Harvard M.D. has bounced back from the science-fantasy silliness of Sphere (1987) for another taut reworking of the Frankenstein theme, as in The Andromeda Strain and The Terminal Man. Here, Dr. Frankenstein is aging billionaire John Hammond, whose monster is a manmade ecosystem based on a Costa Rican island. Designed as the world's ultimate theme park, the ecosystem boasts climate and flora of the Jurassic Age and—most spectacularly—15 varieties of dinosaurs, created by elaborate genetic engineering that Crichton explains in fascinating detail, rich with dino-lore and complete with graphics. Into the park, for a safety check before its opening, comes the novel's band of characters—who, though well drawn, double as symbolic types in this unsubtle morality play. Among them are hero Alan Grant, noble paleontologist; Hammond, venal and obsessed; amoral dino-designer Henry Wu; Hammond's two innocent grandchildren; and mathematician Ian Malcolm, who in long diatribes serves as Crichton's mouthpiece to lament the folly of science. Upon arrival, the visitors tour the park; meanwhile, an industrial spy steals some dino embryos by shutting down the island's power—and its security grid, allowing the beasts to run loose. The bulk of the remaining narrative consists of dinos—ferocious T. Rex's, voracious velociraptors, venom-spitting dilophosaurs—stalking, ripping, and eating the cast in fast, furious, and suspenseful set-pieces as the ecosystem spins apart. And can Grant prevent the dinos from escaping to the mainland to create unchecked havoc? Though intrusive, the moralizing rarely slows this tornado-paced tale, a slick package of info-thrills that's Crichton's most clever since Congo (1980)—and easily the most exciting dinosaur novel ever written. A sure-fire best-seller.
Pub Date: Nov. 7, 1990
ISBN: 0394588169
Page Count: 424
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1990
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