A sometimes-enjoyable read for mystery fans, but its ending fizzles.
Kelly’s (The Black Jade, 2018, etc.) Santa Monica–based gumshoe, Frank Murphy, is back to investigate the death of a high-end hotel chef.
On the morning of July 2, 1933, the lifeless body of Lucien Dubois is found in his seventh-floor room in the hotel where he works—The Californian in Santa Monica, which is frequented by Hollywood glitterati and tourists drawn to the beach and the hotel’s popular speak-easy. It’s the big July Fourth weekend, and also the hotel’s one-year anniversary. Owner Mark Prism hopes to keep a lid on the bad news. Based on the recommendation of Los Angeles police Detective Jack Stark, he hires Murphy to investigate the cause of the chef’s death. It doesn’t take long for the 30-year-old PI to determine that Dubois has been poisoned. Together with his new partner and main squeeze, Monica Stone, Murphy sets out to solve the murder. Dubois was known as a playboy, so was his killer a spurned lover? An angry husband? Or perhaps his death was related to his gambling debts from frequent trips to a casino barge, the SS Crown, docked offshore; the Crown is also the liquor supplier for the Californian’s Anchor Bar speak-easy. Dubois was likely responsible for purchasing beverages for the club, which suggests a possible mob connection to his demise. Murphy works his sources, while Stone goes undercover as a dance hostess in the club and on the Crown. Overall, Kelly’s historical mystery is more intriguing for its portrayal of 1930s LA than for its noir-thriller elements. A couple of good action episodes pick up the pace, though, as when Stone is kidnapped and Murphy comes to her rescue. Sporadic flashbacks add details about secondary characters and keep readers a half step ahead of Murphy and Stone. Generally, though, the tension is rather mild, and the conclusion is disappointing. The author employs a dash of era-appropriate detective jargon (women are usually called “doll,” “honey,” or “kid”), but he also gets tangled in some strange linguistic slip-ups; the term “water closet,” for instance, is badly mangled as “toilet closet water compartment.”
A sometimes-enjoyable read for mystery fans, but its ending fizzles.Pub Date: Nov. 26, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-73084-048-7
Page Count: 204
Publisher: Time Tunnel Media
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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