This dark and dazzling novel defies easy categorization but consistently tantalizes and surprises.
A bizarre murder in 1970s Japan continues to reverberate through the decades. This book, originally published in 2005 under the title Eugenia, is the first by Onda to be translated into English.
After opening with a short, unusually lyrical excerpt from the transcript of a police interview, the book unfolds through chapters told from strikingly different perspectives. The first narrator is Makiko Saiga, who wrote a book about the crime in question, the poisoning of 17 people at a birthday party at the Aosawa family estate. Looking back on the murders 30 years later, Saiga, who was a child at the time, remembers it was a humid summer in a beautiful setting by the sea. Then, several months after the crime, a man who didn't seem to have any connection to the Aosawas wrote up a confession and then hanged himself. Though skeptical, the police took the opportunity to close the case. Saiga went on to research and publish The Forgotten Festival, her only book, about the crime. As she winds up her story, she implies that Hisako, the blind young Aosawa heiress and the only survivor of the massacre, might have been the killer. "You see, it's a very simple story. If there are ten people in a house and nine die, who is the culprit?" The next narrator is Saiga’s assistant, who’s highly suspicious of her boss’s motives. An excerpt from The Forgotten Festival follows, a thinly veiled dramatization in which Saiga places her younger self at the scene of the crime and implicates a man she sees as the messenger of death. Subsequent sections focus on the housekeeper’s daughter, the detective, Saiga’s older brother, and others on the way to the surprising conclusion. The domino effect of the murder on the community and the nation, as well as the swirl of uncertainty concerning the way its narratives are shaped, gives the book a striking resonance.
This dark and dazzling novel defies easy categorization but consistently tantalizes and surprises.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-912242-24-5
Page Count: 346
Publisher: Bitter Lemon Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 10, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
By turns grim and giddy, this is a good read in the service of dark cops.
Savage dope dealers, dirty cops, corrupt officials, and a few hapless civilians mix it up in New York City.
After The Cartel (2015), Winslow follows the drug trade onto the streets. The Manhattan North Special Task Force is a lightly supervised assemblage of “the smartest, the toughest, the quickest, the bravest, the best, the baddest” cops in the NYPD, and Denny Malone commands a happily representative task force squad: his boyhood pal Phil Russo; big, black Bill Montague, who dresses like an Ivy League professor; and Billy O’Neill, the youngest. The book opens with Malone in a federal lockup—how he got there unfolds in breakneck flashbacks told in the cadences and vocabulary of a cop’s speech. The pivotal, but by no means the first, of his many indiscretions is skimming $4 million and 20 kilos of heroin from the scene of a major bust. He also executes the kingpin, and in the raid, Billy is killed. The narrative picks up five months later, and the legal and extralegal exploits of the task force are detailed. The reader is asked to admire the effectiveness of their policing while condemning their methods—Joseph Wambaugh did it better. Malone’s brother, Liam, a firefighter, was killed on 9/11, and that horrific disaster for first responders forms a grim attitudinal backdrop to their days. Malone and the boys are dirty cops: they take and deliver payoffs, ignore the demands of the Black Lives Matter movement, and administer crude vigilante justice. Drugs are gotten off the street, though some may go up their noses or into their lungs. Eventually Malone is trapped, caught on tape offering to broker a payoff to an assistant district attorney. He cuts a deal to name lawyers but not cops, but corrupt prosecutors and deceitful administrators confound him. His alternatives shrink; more deals are made and abrogated. Are Malone’s crimes an inescapable consequence of his working conditions? Must the police break the law to keep the peace?
By turns grim and giddy, this is a good read in the service of dark cops.Pub Date: June 20, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-06-266441-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2017
Nearly as many recipes as Joy of Cooking, and about as much narrative.
A baker helps solve her sister’s boyfriend’s classmate’s murder.
Hannah Swensen is suffering from stress due to a trauma incurred in her last adventure (Chocolate Cream Pie Murder, 2019) but alluded to only in the most elliptical terms in her current entry. Hannah’s stepfather, Doc Knight, is adamant: She must leave at once for vacation. He sends Hannah and her mom off to California for a stress-free holiday helping Hannah’s college friend Lynne Larchmont pack up her palatial home and move back to Lake Eden, Minnesota, where Hannah’s shop, The Cookie Jar, provides sweet treats for all. A New York minute after she arrives in Los Angeles, Hannah receives a hysterical call from her sister, Michelle. Michelle’s boyfriend, Lonnie, is the main suspect in the murder of Darcy Hicks, an old friend from high school. Since Lonnie is one of Lake Eden’s handful of police detectives, everyone else on the force is deemed ineligible to conduct the investigation, leaving only amateur sleuth Hannah to crack the case. Hannah moves back in, platonically of course, with her old flame Norman Rhodes, since her Lake Eden condo was the scene of that unspecified trauma and her husband, Ross Barton, has disappeared, or died, or maybe killed somebody—it’s not quite clear which. Hannah begins her investigation by checking out Brian and Cassie Polinski, who were with Darcy and Lonnie at the Double Eagle, a dive bar, the night of her death. But it’s hard for her inquiry to build up any steam because almost every chapter ends with copious directions for making another nifty treat, complete with tips on which brands to use, advice about where to buy the ingredients, and little anecdotes about the people who feast on the finished products.
Nearly as many recipes as Joy of Cooking, and about as much narrative.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-4967-1889-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Kensington
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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