Let’s hope Rowling’s next book is sharper and shorter.
J.K. Rowling returns with her fourth pseudonymous mystery, putting Cormoran Strike and his now–partner in detecting, Robin Ellacott, in the middle of a scheme involving blackmail, murder, and the House of Commons.
Fans have had to wait three years for the latest Galbraith (Career of Evil, 2015, etc.) novel, but the book picks up exactly where the last installment left off, with Strike arriving late to Robin’s wedding, just after she says “I do” to her odious fiance, Matthew. Strike had recently fired Robin from her job at his private detective agency, worried about her safety after a serial killer tried to make her his next victim, and Robin is more concerned with whether he’s going to hire her back than about making sure the wedding guests are enjoying themselves. Not-really-spoiler-alert: He is. Flash-forward a year, and the agency is prospering when a mentally ill man named Billy shows up with a half-coherent story about having witnessed something terrible when he was a child: “I seen a kid killed…strangled.” Soon after, Jasper Chiswell (pronounced “Chizzle,” in the obscure way of the English upper class), the Minister for Culture, hires Strike to find dirt on two people he says are blackmailing him: Geraint Winn, whose wife is another government minister, and Jimmy Knight, who, not coincidentally, is the brother of Billy, whose story Strike had been looking into. Robin goes undercover in Chiswell’s office, where we meet a variety of the minister’s colleagues, friends, and family members. Rowling keeps many balls up in the air—perhaps too many considering the dead body that gets the book off the ground doesn’t show up until Page 281. There are still another 366 pages to go, and much of that length is a slog. Robin, who can be a great character, spends way too much time wondering what to do about her personal life—for the fourth book in a row. The mystery itself is complex, which is good, verging on convoluted, which is not. There are pleasures to be had, as in Rowling’s jokes on her uber-posh characters: “ ‘Steady on, old chap,’ said [Chiswell’s son-in-law], something that Robin had never thought to hear outside a book.” But there’s way too much filler in between.
Let’s hope Rowling’s next book is sharper and shorter.Pub Date: Sept. 18, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-42273-4
Page Count: 650
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2018
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
But John Steinbeck, the philosopher, dominates his material and brings it into sharply moral focus.
Tremendous in scope—tremendous in depth of penetration—and as different a Steinbeck as the Steinbeck of Burning Bright was from the Steinbeck of The Grapes of Wrath.
Here is no saga of the underprivileged—no drama of social significance. Tenderness, which some felt was inherent in everything Steinbeck wrote, is muted almost to the vanishing point in this story of conflict within character, impact of character on character, of circumstances on personalities, of the difficult acceptance of individual choice as against the dominance of inherited traits. The philosophy is intimately interwoven with the pace of story, as he follows-from New England to California over some fifty odd years-the two families which hold stage center. There are the Trasks, brothers in two generations, strangely linked, strangely at war the one with the other; there are the Hamiltons (John Steinbeck's own forebears), a unique Irish born couple, the man an odd lovable sort of genius who never capitalizes on his ideas for himself, the tiny wife, tart, cold-and revealing now and again unexpected gentleness of spirit, the burgeoning family, as varied a tribe as could be found. And- on the periphery but integral to the deepening philosophy which motivates the story, there is the wise Chinese servant scholar and gentleman, who submerges his own goals to identify himself wholly with the needs of the desolate Adam Trask, crushed by his soulless wife's desertion, and the twin boys, Cal, violent, moody, basically strong enough to be himself—and Aron, gentle, unwilling to face disagreeable facts, beloved by all who met him. In counterpoint, the story follows too the murky career of Adam's wife, Cathy—who came to him from a mysteriously clouded past, and returned to a role for which she was suited—as a costly whore, and later as Madame in Salinas most corrupt "house," where the perversions of sex ridden males were catered to—and cruelty capitalized upon.Shock techniques applied with rapier and not bludgeon will rule the book out for the tender-skinned.
But John Steinbeck, the philosopher, dominates his material and brings it into sharply moral focus.Pub Date: Sept. 19, 1952
ISBN: 0142004235
Page Count: 616
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1952
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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