The results of Postgate’s probing eye, by turns psychological and sociological, are richly and rewardingly ironic, right...
This reprint of Postgate’s celebrated 1940 debut, which examines the impact of individual jury members’ lives and opinions on the outcome of a murder case, is the first entry in Poisoned Pen’s British Library Crime Classics to actually live up to the series title.
Rosalie van Beer stands accused of poisoning her nephew, 11-year-old Philip Arkwright, with some wicked stuff called hederin found in the ivy dust she allegedly sprinkled on his lunch. The case is compelling: Rosalie had never liked the boy; her own position in the Arkwright family, which she’d married into and been widowed from, had always been marginal; the mutual dislike festering between Philip and her had been dramatically escalated by her execution of his beloved pet rabbit; and his death will bring her a fortune. But Elizabeth and James Rodd, her housekeeper and gardener, would also benefit financially from Philip’s death, though on a much smaller scale, and Sir Isambard Burns, her counsel, has learned some information he’s convinced will be the basis for an effective defense. So far, so routine, though Postgate writes with a memorably acrid wit. The innovation here is a long opening section providing detailed portraits of the 12 jurors who’ll decide the case, each of them with their own prejudices, quirks, and variously relevant back stories. Once they’ve heard the evidence and retired to the jury room to consider it, the actor among them considers the performances of the attorneys, the Oxford don wonders why he isn’t the foreman, the Greek immigrant who is the foreman does his best to conduct everything as Englishly as possible, and the religious fundamentalist seeks divine guidance he can foist on the others.
The results of Postgate’s probing eye, by turns psychological and sociological, are richly and rewardingly ironic, right down to the indelibly understated final speech. A classic reprint you can’t afford to miss.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4642-0790-7
Page Count: 244
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: July 3, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.
“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-55634-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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