An amusingly quirky read that might have benefited from a stronger edit.
A comedic murder mystery set on a college campus in upstate New York stars an offbeat heroine with an active imagination.
Twenty-nine-year-old Ruby Roy is an associate professor at Baron University’s College of Business, located not far from Niagara Falls. She’s the well-traveled only child of an Indian diplomat father and a Canadian mother, and she holds several postgraduate degrees from various prestigious universities. She also has a history of awkward moments and embarrassing incidents, due largely to bad luck and social anxiety. Now she’s working to get tenure at Baron, while her husband, Cleo, is attempting to create his first video game. Ruby is mostly happy at the university, where she has a coterie of eclectic international friends among the faculty. One evening, she returns to her office to retrieve a forgotten backpack and decides to say hello to her department chair, Dr. Peter Malcolm; instead, she discovers him sitting in his office chair, mouth agape and eyes staring lifelessly. A knife handle protrudes from his bloody chest. Then someone hits her on the head and knocks her unconscious. She wakes up in an ambulance and is questioned by police detective Chris Jones. Although badly shaken, Ruby is a fan of British detective shows and American TV police procedurals, and she soon feels compelled to investigate the murder herself. The narrative has all the right ingredients for an intriguing whodunit. However, Ray often chooses humor over suspense, indulging in numerous digressions and cartoonishly exaggerated characters. Many pages are filled with Ruby’s busy, fanciful interior musings, which draw on the tropes of action-hero adventures and Indian romantic musicals. It’s often a fun romp that occasionally borders on slapstick. It does lack a certain restraint, though; Ray tends to overexplain celebrity references that most will find obvious, and Ruby’s dream sequences are too lengthy. Still, the mystery builds to an exciting climax, and there’s an unexpected final twist.
An amusingly quirky read that might have benefited from a stronger edit.Pub Date: May 3, 2022
ISBN: 979-8793362641
Page Count: 232
Publisher: BMB Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A vivid, exciting page-turner from one of our most interesting authors of historical fiction.
When a man accused of rape turns up dead, an Early American town seeks justice amid rumors and controversy.
Lawhon’s fifth work of historical fiction is inspired by the true story and diaries of midwife Martha Ballard of Hallowell, Maine, a character she brings to life brilliantly here. As Martha tells her patient in an opening chapter set in 1789, “You need not fear….In all my years attending women in childbirth, I have never lost a mother.” This track record grows in numerous compelling scenes of labor and delivery, particularly one in which Martha has to clean up after the mistakes of a pompous doctor educated at Harvard, one of her nemeses in a town that roils with gossip and disrespect for women’s abilities. Supposedly, the only time a midwife can testify in court is regarding paternity when a woman gives birth out of wedlock—but Martha also takes the witness stand in the rape case against a dead man named Joshua Burgess and his living friend Col. Joseph North, whose role as judge in local court proceedings has made the victim, Rebecca Foster, reluctant to make her complaint public. Further complications are numerous: North has control over the Ballard family's lease on their property; Rebecca is carrying the child of one of her rapists; Martha’s son was seen fighting with Joshua Burgess on the day of his death. Lawhon weaves all this into a richly satisfying drama that moves suspensefully between childbed, courtroom, and the banks of the Kennebec River. The undimmed romance between 40-something Martha and her husband, Ephraim, adds a racy flair to the proceedings. Knowing how rare the quality of their relationship is sharpens the intensity of Martha’s gaze as she watches the romantic lives of her grown children unfold. As she did with Nancy Wake in Code Name Hélène (2020), Lawhon creates a stirring portrait of a real-life heroine and, as in all her books, includes an endnote with detailed background.
A vivid, exciting page-turner from one of our most interesting authors of historical fiction.Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9780385546874
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Aug. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2023
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