There are so many layers beneath layers of deception, in fact, that even the most enthralled readers—and there will be...
Think it would be fun to discover a lost symphony by Ludwig van Beethoven? Think again.
Inside the cedar box New Jersey hardware salesman Jake Hassler brings to auction house Cubbage & Wakeham is a pair of ledgers overflowing with handwritten musical passages, some scratched out, some incomplete, some written over. One of the volumes is labeled “Wilhelm Tell: Eine Dramatische Symphonie.” Under the increasingly pointed questioning of partner Harrison Ellsworth Cubbage III and Mitchell Emery, the ex-prosecutor heading the firm’s Department of Authentication and Appraisal, Jake tells how, after the death of his grandfather Otto Hassler in Zurich, he and Otto’s neighbor Ansel Erpf found the volumes in Otto’s attic and he spirited them out of the country before Ansel, Otto’s residuary legatee, could object. Everyone involved is afraid to believe that the find amounts to a version, however sketchy and incomplete, of Beethoven’s 10th Symphony, but that’s exactly what everyone wants it to be. Before Cubbage & Wakeham can move to offer the maybe-priceless item at auction, they have to explain its radical departures from the master’s other symphonies; they have to establish Jake Hassler’s clear title to it as part of the personal papers his grandfather left him; they have to determine what revisions might be required to make it performable; and they have to fight off the amusingly and increasingly determined attempts of Swiss and German attachés, an unnamed Asian millionaire, and several lesser private citizens to claim title or, failing that, to inveigh against its legitimacy. Novelist/historian Kluger (Indelible Ink: The Trials of John Peter Zenger and the Birth of America’s Free Press, 2016, etc.) knows both his Beethoven and his legal quiddities inside out, and over the course of an investigation headed mostly by Mitch Emery, he succeeds in casting serious doubt on the bona fides of American academics, German scholars, Swiss bankers, and virtually everyone else involved in this seven-course banquet of musical legend and coldhearted fraud.
There are so many layers beneath layers of deception, in fact, that even the most enthralled readers—and there will be many—are more likely to greet the climactic twist with exhausted relief than satisfaction.Pub Date: Aug. 12, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-945572-98-2
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Rare Bird Books
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet...
Four Chicago sisters anchor a sharp, sly family story of feminine guile and guilt.
Newcomer Lombardo brews all seven deadly sins into a fun and brimming tale of an unapologetically bougie couple and their unruly daughters. In the opening scene, Liza Sorenson, daughter No. 3, flirts with a groomsman at her sister’s wedding. “There’s four of you?” he asked. “What’s that like?” Her retort: “It’s a vast hormonal hellscape. A marathon of instability and hair products.” Thus begins a story bristling with a particular kind of female intel. When Wendy, the oldest, sets her sights on a mate, she “made sure she left her mark throughout his house—soy milk in the fridge, box of tampons under the sink, surreptitious spritzes of her Bulgari musk on the sheets.” Turbulent Wendy is the novel’s best character, exuding a delectable bratty-ness. The parents—Marilyn, all pluck and busy optimism, and David, a genial family doctor—strike their offspring as impossibly happy. Lombardo levels this vision by interspersing chapters of the Sorenson parents’ early lean times with chapters about their daughters’ wobbly forays into adulthood. The central story unfurls over a single event-choked year, begun by Wendy, who unlatches a closed adoption and springs on her family the boy her stuffy married sister, Violet, gave away 15 years earlier. (The sisters improbably kept David and Marilyn clueless with a phony study-abroad scheme.) Into this churn, Lombardo adds cancer, infidelity, a heart attack, another unplanned pregnancy, a stillbirth, and an office crush for David. Meanwhile, youngest daughter Grace perpetrates a whopper, and “every day the lie was growing like mold, furring her judgment.” The writing here is silky, if occasionally overwrought. Still, the deft touches—a neighborhood fundraiser for a Little Free Library, a Twilight character as erotic touchstone—delight. The class calibrations are divine even as the utter apolitical whiteness of the Sorenson world becomes hard to fathom.
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet another pleasurable tendril of sisterly malice uncurls.Pub Date: June 25, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54425-2
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: March 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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