The most conventional of Ellis’s three cases, but still heartfelt and often piercing in its portrayal of life on the edge...
A third walk on the wild side for Ellis Portal (The Feast of Stephen, 1999, etc.), former judge and former street person, whose police contact, Sgt. Matt West, wants his help mopping up the fallout from the murder of director Charington Simm during the Toronto Film Festival. Simm’s shooting must have been a cunning piece of work, since none of the hundreds of witnesses who saw his car pull up in front of a premiere noticed anything suspicious until Carrie, his daughter and star, saw his body fall to the ground. It’s not the murder he wants Ellis’s help with, Matt insists; it’s Carrie’s disappearance, presumably back into the jungle of street friends and shelters she knew only too well from her days as a runaway. At first Ellis resists. Humbled as he’s been, he has no great desire to return to the streets. But when a meeting that his manipulative old rival John Stoughton-Melville has set up with Ellis’s estranged son Jeffrey goes sour, and a greedy developer seizes his rooming house from under him and his landlady, former girl-gang member Tootie Beets, Ellis, seeing no better options, resigns himself to search for the vanished Carrie and Tootie—and the mysterious “Ferryman” to whom they’re both linked—through a series of nightmare landscapes from the Marble Widow, an uncompleted office building downtown, to his unlamented old stomping ground in the Don River Valley.
The most conventional of Ellis’s three cases, but still heartfelt and often piercing in its portrayal of life on the edge for all the once and future homeless.Pub Date: June 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-882593-44-8
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Bridge Works
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Lively scenes pop up here and there, but 500-plus pages will transmogrify most thrillers into a relentless march of...
Another parboiled offering from the poster boy of southern gothic thrillers (Blood Memory, 2005, etc.).
Natchez, Miss., a town that has seen rosier days, is about to get kicked while it’s down. Kate Townsend, shining light of her senior class—valedictorian, gorgeous, a double state champion (tennis and swimming) with a full scholarship to Harvard—has drowned. Her death is being linked to a pillar of the community, the estimable, beloved Dr. Drew Elliot, a husband and father who is 23 years Kate’s senior. Among the locals most seriously affected is upright, unselfish Penn Cage, Drew’s lifelong friend. A former prosecutor now considering a run for mayor, he’s asked to represent Drew, who confesses to an affair with Kate, which will surely place him in the vanguard of suspects if her death turns out to be foul play. Penn is shaken and thinks fleetingly of distancing himself from a situation that is certainly messy and potentially ruinous. He knows Natchez, and he knows how quickly its citizens can turn if they feel betrayed. Drew, however, is loyal, and a good guy’s got to do what a good guy’s got to do. As Penn pursues an investigation on Drew’s behalf, he discovers things about his friend, about Kate, about his town and about himself that will darken his view of civic responsibility.
Lively scenes pop up here and there, but 500-plus pages will transmogrify most thrillers into a relentless march of predictable events.Pub Date: Dec. 27, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-3471-5
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2005
IN THE NEWS
A twisty slow burner by an author at the top of her game.
A timely novel set in the furthest reaches of Australia by the author of The Dry (2017) and Force of Nature (2018).
The three Bright brothers are the overseers of 3,500 square kilometers of land in Queensland, with hours between each of their homes. It’s a vast, unforgiving environment, and no one ever goes far without a full complement of supplies. When 40-year-old Cameron sets out on his own, ostensibly to fix a repeater mast, he never comes home. His body is eventually spotted, via helicopter, curled up by the stockman’s grave, the source of plentiful, and persistent, local ghost stories. Cam’s older brother, Nathan, and their baby brother, Bub, are as perplexed as the cop who’s come all the way from Brisbane to investigate. What was Cam doing by the grave, and what was his Land Cruiser doing nine kilometers away, still fully stocked with supplies, with the keys left neatly on the front seat? The Brights' mother, Liz, is devastated, and Cam has also left behind his wife, Ilse, and two young daughters, Sophie and Lo. They’re pragmatic folks, though, and there’s a funeral to be planned, plus Christmas is just around the corner. Everyone seems to assume that Cam took his own life, but Nathan isn’t so sure, and there’s a strange dynamic in Cam's home that he can’t put his finger on. Cam had been acting strangely in the weeks before his death, too. But Nathan’s got his own problems. He’s eager to reconnect with his teenage son, Xander, who's visiting from Brisbane, and he has a complicated history with Ilse. In the days leading up to the funeral, family secrets begin to surface, and Nathan realizes he never really knew his brother at all. Harper’s masterful narrative places readers right in the middle of a desolate landscape that’s almost as alien as the moon’s surface, where the effects of long-term isolation are always a concern. The mystery of Cam’s death is at the dark heart of an unfolding family drama that will leave readers reeling, and the final reveal is a heartbreaker.
A twisty slow burner by an author at the top of her game.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-10568-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 12, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2018
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