Compelling if at times convoluted “herstory” of Holmes’ famous woman.
The sharp-witted actress who earned Sherlock Holmes’ admiration offers her own recollections in this first installment of a Conan Doyle–inspired series.
Irene Adler begins her “case book” by describing how she disguises herself as a frumpy older woman to become Holmes’ housekeeper. He appears to buy her masquerade, although when he’s high on cocaine, he calls her by her real name. Irene then circles back to describe how she has, after “patchy if unspectacular success” as an actress, joined a bohemian group of justice-seeking avengers self-dubbed the Club des As, after an aristocratic lover swiped a beloved brooch. She proceeds to recount the group’s adventures, which are largely focused on righting society’s wrongs or at least puncturing its pretensions: kidnapping racists to teach them a lesson; forging a Millais painting, which fools even Holmes; and switching out letters being used against an Oscar Wilde–type club member, a scam that Holmes at least partially unravels. Irene’s account culminates with her perspective on the King of Bohemia case (where she first appeared in Doyle’s fiction), which reveals why she became Holmes’ housekeeper and battled Professor Moriarty with him at Reichenbach Falls. Edinburgh-based Cassimally has created a fun, feminist twist on the Holmes canon, fleshing out a character who was only briefly mentioned yet, in Doyle’s “A Scandal in Bohemia,” received the ultimate accolade: “To Sherlock Holmes she is always the woman.” Irene provides wonderfully acerbic observances on a host of topics, particularly on Holmes himself: for instance, “I discovered that he had no ear for irony.” Occasionally, her libertinelike persona is a bit disturbing, however, as when she falls in love—or at least lust—with a child murderer. More problematic is the narrative’s episodic, somewhat chronologically confused construction, which gets a bit bogged down with some less-than-stellar cases and may displease readers looking for a more linear path to solving the Irene/Holmes relationship. Still, the showdown at Reichenbach Falls is worth the wait, serving as a powerful cliffhanger and launchpad for The Memoirs of Irene Adler, the already published second book of the series.
Compelling if at times convoluted “herstory” of Holmes’ famous woman.Pub Date: July 3, 2014
ISBN: 978-1497301573
Page Count: 202
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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