This pipe dream’s highly original narrative structure, consistently subordinating events to voices, allows Bailey (The Small...
As its title suggests, Bailey’s final novel is a valentine to the private-eye conventions that have seemed like clichés since about two weeks after they were presented as fresh and new a century ago.
Raymond Kerze can’t afford to be choosy about his clients. The only reason he can even afford to live in his office, after all, is that the building’s in foreclosure, and the city of Detroit doesn’t bother to bill its few remaining tenants for rent. But Ray really doesn’t want to take Misty Lake’s money. For one thing, she’s got only $11.60. For another, she’s offering it to him for killing her. Before she got laid off from her job as a waitress, she borrowed $500 from mobbed-up loan shark Benny Slick, and now her failure to keep up with the vig has ballooned her debt to $950, which might as well be a million. Since she’s Catholic, Misty can’t kill herself, though she seems to have no scruples about hiring Ray to push her out his office window (a no-go, since he’s on the second floor) or stand by as she provokes a pair of Aryan-tattooed skinheads lurking outside the building to stab her to death. As things work out, Misty doesn’t die, but Theodore Sorenson, one of the skinheads, does, unleashing mounting complications for Ray, Misty, Misty’s ex-boyfriend Jeffrey Enwright, Detective Tony Jackson, and Teddy’s skinhead pal John Doe, each of whom gets to tell part of the story. Or, if “story” is too strong a word, to present his or her carnival act in close-up before yielding to the next one and eventually to the final fade-out.
This pipe dream’s highly original narrative structure, consistently subordinating events to voices, allows Bailey (The Small Matter of Ten Large, 2012, etc.) and his readers to inhabit a series of characters that morph from cartoon tough guys and gals to people worth caring about once you get to see them from outside and inside.Pub Date: July 31, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-937868-76-5
Page Count: 252
Publisher: Ignition Books
Review Posted Online: May 1, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2019
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
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