by Rachel Rhys ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 9, 2018
The most compelling mystery here lurks between the lines.
An Englishwoman running from her past finds herself out of her depth on a 1939 ocean voyage from England to Australia.
The opening tableau of Rhys’ novel flashes forward to its close: an elegant woman, handcuffed, clad in a green dress with matching hat and pumps and one of those fox stoles with a head, is escorted off a ship by police. Her identity and crime remain undisclosed until the end. Lily Shepherd, Rhys’ protagonist and sole narrator, is a former housemaid whose affair with the master’s son has driven her to enlist in a government program that recruits young women for domestic service in Australia. Upon embarking from Essex on the ocean liner Orontes, Lily is plunged into an ethnically and socially striated floating universe, competently evoked by Rhys. Sailing in tourist class, Lily has assigned dinner companions who include Edward Fletcher, newly recovered from tuberculosis, who is traveling to Australia for his heath, and his older sister, Helena. A less welcome fellow diner is George Price, a blustering bigot. Lily is immediately attracted to curly-haired, handsome Edward. She finds a confidante in Maria Katz, a Jewish woman who fled Nazi-annexed Austria and is anguished over the unknown fate of her parents, who stayed behind. First-class passengers Eliza and Max Campbell, charismatic aristocrats, often dragoon Lily and Edward into onboard and shoreside escapades involving copious alcohol consumption. But why are Eliza and Max slumming with the bourgeoisie in second class? On one such excursion, to the pyramids, Edward and Lily kiss, but for the ensuing weeks at sea he waxes alternately warm and distant. Lily is nonplussed, but her bafflement is required to guard the novel's main wellspring of suspense, which has little to do with the identities of the murderess or victim. The very naming of this issue would constitute a spoiler, which is a shame: dealing with it head-on would have made for a more complex and less coy narrative.
The most compelling mystery here lurks between the lines.Pub Date: Jan. 9, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-6272-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Oct. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2017
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by J.A. Jance ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 2, 2019
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
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A convicted killer’s list of five people he wants dead runs the gamut from the wife he’s already had murdered to franchise heroine Ali Reynolds.
Back in the day, women came from all over to consult Santa Clarita fertility specialist Dr. Edward Gilchrist. Many of them left his care happily pregnant, never dreaming that the father of the babies they carried was none other than the physician himself, who donated his own sperm rather than that of the handsome, athletic, disease-free men pictured in his scrapbook. When Alexandra Munsey’s son, Evan, is laid low by the kidney disease he’s inherited from his biological father and she returns to Gilchrist in search of the donor’s medical records, the roof begins to fall in on him. By the time it’s done falling, he’s serving a life sentence in Folsom Prison for commissioning the death of his wife, Dawn, the former nurse and sometime egg donor who’d turned on him. With nothing left to lose, Gilchrist tattoos himself with the initials of five people he blames for his fall: Dawn; Leo Manuel Aurelio, the hit man he’d hired to dispose of her; Kaitlyn Todd, the nurse/receptionist who took Dawn’s place; Alex Munsey, whose search for records upset his apple cart; and Ali Reynolds, the TV reporter who’d helped put Alex in touch with the dozen other women who formed the Progeny Project because their children looked just like hers. No matter that Ali’s been out of both California and the news business for years; Gilchrist and his enablers know that revenge can’t possibly be served too cold. Wonder how far down that list they’ll get before Ali, aided once more by Frigg, the methodical but loose-cannon AI first introduced in Duel to the Death (2018), turns on them?
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how little the boundary-challenged AI, who gets into the case more or less inadvertently, differs from your standard human sidekick with issues.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5101-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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by Roy Jacobsen ; translated by Don Bartlett & Don Shaw ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 7, 2020
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.
Norwegian novelist Jacobsen folds a quietly powerful coming-of-age story into a rendition of daily life on one of Norway’s rural islands a hundred years ago in a novel that was shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize.
Ingrid Barrøy, her father, Hans, mother, Maria, grandfather Martin, and slightly addled aunt Barbro are the owners and sole inhabitants of Barrøy Island, one of numerous small family-owned islands in an area of Norway barely touched by the outside world. The novel follows Ingrid from age 3 through a carefree early childhood of endless small chores, simple pleasures, and unquestioned familial love into her more ambivalent adolescence attending school off the island and becoming aware of the outside world, then finally into young womanhood when she must make difficult choices. Readers will share Ingrid’s adoration of her father, whose sense of responsibility conflicts with his romantic nature. He adores Maria, despite what he calls her “la-di-da” ways, and is devoted to Ingrid. Twice he finds work on the mainland for his sister, Barbro, but, afraid she’ll be unhappy, he brings her home both times. Rooted to the land where he farms and tied to the sea where he fishes, Hans struggles to maintain his family’s hardscrabble existence on an island where every repair is a struggle against the elements. But his efforts are Sisyphean. Life as a Barrøy on Barrøy remains precarious. Changes do occur in men’s and women’s roles, reflected in part by who gets a literal chair to sit on at meals, while world crises—a war, Sweden’s financial troubles—have unexpected impact. Yet the drama here occurs in small increments, season by season, following nature’s rhythm through deaths and births, moments of joy and deep sorrow. The translator’s decision to use roughly translated phrases in conversation—i.e., “Tha’s goen’ nohvar” for "You’re going nowhere")—slows the reading down at first but ends up drawing readers more deeply into the world of Barrøy and its prickly, intensely alive inhabitants.
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-77196-319-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Biblioasis
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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