A zealous, persistently amusing detective tale.
Sleuth Carnegie Fitch returns to investigate a dubious new religion headed by a dangerous quasi-preacher in the second installment of a mystery series about him.
Despite successfully closing a case the year before, unlicensed Vancouver private eye Fitch has given up his office. Now driving a tow truck, he still has the PI “itch” and is currently working pro bono in his search for a missing calico cat. But he may have something more substantial when his sexual partner, Adora Carmichael, asks him to keep an eye out for a “kooky” local religion and its ruckus-causing preacher. Fitch sits in on a meeting of the Disciples of the Sacred Glow and quickly knows something is indeed wrong. Preacher Quincy Quest is actually Copernicus Janssen, an ex-dentist whom Fitch knows, from years ago, is bad news. This discovery leads to a paying client: Kathleen Brasher, whose son, Hugo, inexplicably closed the family business, and the Disciples now meet at the company’s former warehouse. But facing off against Janssen won’t be easy. The preacher also remembers Fitch and, aware of what the PI is up to, points two muscle-bound security men in his direction. But Fitch’s biggest threat is “the glow,” the DSG’s supposedly healing light that, in reality, precipitates a horrifying experience. Though the villain is immediately clear, Lester’s (Dead Clown Blues, 2017, etc.) briskly paced novella still allows for scenes of investigation. Fitch, for one, looks into an old murder that may have ties to Janssen. The baddies are unquestionably menacing and sometimes use Fitch as a punching bag; the story, however, as in the preceding installment, is predominantly humorous. Fitch’s endless wisecracks are more winsome than cynical, and the best scenes consist entirely of dialogue. Despite Adora’s status as a femme fatale having engaged in criminal activity in the past, the story’s standout character is Ellie Stevens. She’s a whip-smart teen who aids Fitch and has “the resourcefulness and the coffee habit of a 40-year-old.”
A zealous, persistently amusing detective tale.Pub Date: Aug. 30, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-948235-16-7
Page Count: 168
Publisher: Shotgun Honey
Review Posted Online: Feb. 10, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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