Now that his detective-hero Spenser has become such an earnest, predictable character, one looks forward to Parker's second non-Spenser novel—only to find that this short tale of obsessive-love-triumphant does little more than recycle the least attractive aspects of the Spenser persona. The narrator, whose name and plain/purple prose-style suggest a case of Hemingway-itis, is Boone Adams—an undergraduate at 1951 Colby College (Maine) who loses his virginity with a townie but falls madly in love with classmate Jennifer Grayle. And when Jennifer at last responds, dumping her latest boyfriend for Boone's devotion, "Steadiness surged through me, it suffused me, it warmed and solidified my soul and all things were possible and nothing was fearsome." Then, however, would-be writer Boone is expelled (bad grades, bad attitude), drafted to Korea, and Dear-Johnned by Jennifer, who decides to marry rich, handsome John Merchent from Cornell. "Not yet twenty-two, I had loved and lost and my life was without further purpose. And there was so much of it left, a paralyzing long time of it still to go." So, in a brief interlude reminiscent of bygone, corny Hollywood-montage, Boone goes on the skids for a few years—from job to job, across the country, boozing it up, falling apart. . . till he pulls himself together in California: he saves some money; he reads a lot; he gets into bodybuilding à la Spenser. But he never has gotten over Jennifer. (A casual girlfriend gushes: "What you are doing. . . is really quite remarkable. It is the most committed act of will I've ever seen. What you're doing. . . is you're becoming worthy of her.") And so Boone heads back East, getting assorted degrees on the campus where Jennifer and her prof-husband both teach: he quietly re-woos her, impresses her with his echt-Spenser catchwords ("autonomous," "code of behavior"). . . and wins her at last, as his prose adds some imitation-Faulkner to the imitation-Hemingway. (. . . "I felt myself unclench, and my spirit burgeoned spread throughout me and mingled with her perfume and her heat and the weakness was gone and I pressed her against me with the unbestowed strength of a silent quarter-century feeling her press back and feeling my soul begin at last to romp with hers in new created pastures where eternity shimmered before us and time, just begun, was ours forever.") Despite a few nicely wry vignettes along the way: dismayingly thin, self-indulgent work—from a gifted writer whose talent keeps seeping away into narcissism and sentimentality.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1983
ISBN: 0440146291
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: Oct. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1983
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
Irritatingly trite woman-in-periler from lawyer-turned-novelist Baldacci. Moving away from the White House and the white-shoe Washington law firms of his previous bestsellers (Absolute Power, 1996; Total Control, 1997), Baldacci comes up with LuAnn Tyler, a spunky, impossibly beautiful, white-trash truck stop waitress with a no-good husband and a terminally cute infant daughter in tow. Some months after the birth of Lisa, LuAnn gets a phone call summoning her to a make-shift office in an unrented storefront of the local shopping mall. There, she gets a Faustian offer from a Mr. Jackson, a monomaniacal, cross-dressing manipulator who apparently knows the winning numbers in the national lottery before the numbers are drawn. It seems that LuAnn fits the media profile of what a lottery winner should be—poor, undereducated but proud—and if she's willing to buy the right ticket at the right time and transfer most of her winnings to Jackson, she'll be able to retire in luxury. Jackson fails to inform her, however, that if she refuses his offer, he'll have her killed. Before that can happen, as luck would have it, LuAnn barely escapes death when one of husband Duane's drug deals goes bad. She hops on a first-class Amtrak sleeper to Manhattan with a hired executioner in pursuit. But executioner Charlie, one of Jackson's paid handlers, can't help but hear wedding bells when he sees LuAnn cooing with her daughter. Alas, a winning $100- million lottery drawing complicates things. Jackson spirits LuAnn and Lisa away to Sweden, with Charlie in pursuit. Never fear. Not only will LuAnn escape a series of increasingly violent predicaments, but she'll also outwit Jackson, pay an enormous tax bill to the IRS, and have enough left over to honeymoon in Switzerland. Too preposterous to work as feminine wish-fulfillment, too formulaic to be suspenseful. (Book-of-the-Month Club main selection)
Pub Date: Dec. 2, 1997
ISBN: 0-446-52259-7
Page Count: 528
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1997
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