A harmless, sprightly whodunit featuring a captivating gumshoe.
Gripp (Pursuit of the Frog Prince, 2013), a former teacher and Florida Panhandle resident, presents the vibrant sequel to her debut mystery novel.
After skillfully foiling a malevolent kidnapping plot, amiable, “frog-eyed” detective Ben Burrows again finds himself ensuring the safety of the tony enclave of Amherst, New York. It’s Christmas night, and he’s assigned to investigate the death of Alice Beck, who has tragically fallen down the stairs in her home. Or was she pushed? Burrows immediately suspects Alice’s “cocky smart” husband, John, a smarmy stockbroker who he believes initiated a blundered kidnapping attempt on his wife some six months earlier. In that crime, local Amherst resident Peggy Roberts was mistakenly kidnapped instead of Alice by John’s confused henchmen. This time, Burrows believes John ensured the seamless murder of his wife. Gripp capably provides ample back story on the first botched crime attempt and thickens the plot as Burrows scavenges for sufficient evidence to convict John. Meanwhile, Peggy’s storyline satisfyingly continues on as she finds herself enamored with Seth, the romantically pessimistic half brother of one of her former kidnappers. As Burrows’ investigation of John intensifies with expected (and unexpected) developments, a few hard-won resolutions quell some interfamilial melodrama, and another corpse pops up, placing glamorous heiress and John’s confidante, Victoria Reynolds, in grave danger and in need of extra bodyguard protection...with romantic perks. All these events become enmeshed in the long-held animosity of two childhood friends, Cal and Sal, who were exiled to Ohio from their homes 26 years earlier for the attempted murder of one of their cousins. Sal seeks answers from Gwennie Damico, the love of his life who scorned him all those years ago; they rekindle their romance, yet both seem bent on settling the score with Sal’s family. Merging revenge, murder and steamy romance, Gripp’s narrative excels in character development but suffers from an excess of serpentine subplots. Thankfully, Gripp’s aptly named mystery is anchored by an engaging, honorable lead detective whom readers will surely find heroically endearing.
A harmless, sprightly whodunit featuring a captivating gumshoe.Pub Date: Aug. 25, 2014
ISBN: 978-0985939632
Page Count: 284
Publisher: Rachel Gripp
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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