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
Prime candidate for a TV movie.
A romance/investigation debut novel set firmly in the spiritual aftermath of WWI.
Maisie Dobbs, recently turned private investigator in 1929 England, had been a nurse back during the war to end all wars, so she knows about wounds—both those to the body and those to the soul. It’s just a month after she sets up shop that she gets her first interesting case: What initially looks like just another infidelity matter turns out to be a woman’s preoccupation with a dead man, Vincent Weathershaw, in a graveyard. Flashback to Maisie’s upbringing: her transition from servant class to the intellectual class when she shows interest in the works of Hume, Kierkegaard, and Jung. She doesn’t really get to explore her girlhood until she makes some roughshod friends in the all-woman ambulance corps that serves in France, and she of course falls for a soldier, Simon, who writes her letters but then disappears. Now, in 1929, Maisie’s investigation into Vincent Weathershaw leads her to the mysterious Retreat, run like a mix between a barracks and a monastery, where soldiers still traumatized by the war go to recover. Maisie knows that her curiosity just might get her into trouble—yet she trusts her instincts and sends an undercover assistant into the Retreat in the hopes of finding out more about Vincent. But what will happen, she worries, if one needs to retreat from the Retreat? Will she discover the mystery behind her client’s wife’s preoccupation with a man who spent time there? And by any chance, albeit slight, might she encounter that old lover who disappeared back in 1917 and who she worried might be dead? Winspear rarely attempts to elevate her prose past the common romance, and what might have been a journey through a strata of England between the wars is instead just simple, convenient and contrived.
Prime candidate for a TV movie.Pub Date: July 1, 2003
ISBN: 1-56947-330-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Soho
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2003
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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