Fans of Jake and her Eastport pals will enjoy this convoluted tale, packed equally with incidents and tips on household...
A gun-toting college professor arrives in Eastport, Maine, looking for revenge.
Ignoring the fact that she’s hosting a party the next day in honor of retired schoolteacher Merrie Fargeorge, whose Eastport pedigree is ancient, Jacobia “Jake” Tiptree has just taken a sledgehammer to the bathroom in her 200-year-old fixer-upper when Dave DiMaio arrives on her doorstep certain that he knows who murdered his friend Horace Robotham, a rare-book expert who was vetting the strange old volume Jake discovered in her foundation (Trap Door, 2007, etc.). The police have written it off as a mugging gone bad, but Dave is sure the perpetrator is his old college classmate Bert Merkle, an eccentric forger of old books. Jake and her fellow sleuth Ellie White get caught up in Dave’s hunt for the killer after someone pushes a local writer to a watery death and a video-game-obsessed teenaged friend of Merkle is found poisoned, a death the state police consider an accident. Jake is also dealing with Merrie, who’s annoyed by the uproar; her son, recently out of rehab; and her father, who wants to marry her housekeeper. Jake, Ellie and Dave have several exciting adventures and near-death experiences before the case is resolved.
Fans of Jake and her Eastport pals will enjoy this convoluted tale, packed equally with incidents and tips on household repair.Pub Date: Jan. 2, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-553-80430-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Still struggling to adapt to the rigors of Parkerville, Calif. (``Gateway to the High Country'')—her switch from academic research to hands-on plant pathology; her oil-and-vinegar romance with U.C. Extension botanist Sam Cooper; all that sunshine, all those Republicans—M.I.T. transplant Claire Sharples is restless even before she stumbles over the body of Jonathan Levine, an L.A. Free Press reporter drowned in an irrigation canal with a strange yellow flower from hours away stuck in his buttonhole. Parkerville police chief Tom Martelli belittles Claire's curiosity at his peril: She digs into the story on pesticide abuse Jonathan had been following, links his demise to the deaths of two Mexican workers also found in watery graves, and leaves Sam in a snit (after returning from a trip to L.A. to find his car parked outside his ``friend'' Linda Nelson's house at dawn) for lodgings in Jonathan's seedy motel room. Before she's through, Claire will have peered so closely at every man in the case—imperious grape grower Bert Yankovich; his kid brother Emil, a stuttering liberal in love with Claire; pertinacious walnut grower Wayne Harris; even Jeff Green, her knockout blind date down in L.A.—that you'll wonder if she can ever think about a man again without a shudder. As in The Bulrush Murders (1991), Rothenberg is knowing and exact about how lovers and other people fight, and her tale is twistier than mile-high blacktop.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-89296-561-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Taibo's waggish novels about Mexico City shamus Hector Belascoar†n Shayne (No Happy Ending, 1993, etc.) often gave the impression of wanting to be the last detective stories ever written. That impression's even stronger in this novel-about-a- novel that sends mystery writer JosÇ Daniel Fierro, who squeezes orange juice by hand and urinates sitting down, to the northern town of Santa Ana as its new police chief. Against a backdrop of laughably epidemic ruling-party corruption and anti-union warfare, JD and his colorful underlings (an assistant who only answers to ``Blind Man,'' officers who once worked as activists or sold insurance) battle the federal judicial police (who as always are intent on a cover-up) to identify a killer: Someone followed American photographer Anne Goldin from her tryst with Santa Ana's mayor and left her nude, stabbed body in front of the altar at the Church of Carmen. It's only the first of several murders, each of which implicates the victim neatly in the preceding murder. But the case itself, as JD muses in his interspersed letters to his wife back home and in his ``Notes for the History of the Radical City Government of Santa Ana,'' is anything but neat. JD ``discovers nothing, only that things simply happen,'' as in life itself. JD is on target on his own novel's shortcomings: ``It lacks a hook, dramatic architecture, the negative characters...are badly drawn.'' But this end-of-the-road fantasy, so full of Taibo's melancholy cartoon gaiety, will be a feast for connoisseurs.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-89296-518-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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