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MAGGIE TERRY

Schulman offers, with mixed success, a sprawling exploration of New York nostalgia, police brutality, addiction memoir, and...

An ex-cop and ex-junkie tries to turn her life around and, in the process, stumbles into investigating a murder.

Maggie Terry has hit rock bottom. She’s just out of rehab; her ex-girlfriend and their daughter are long gone. She’s starting a new job in a law office after a beloved career with the NYPD went up in flames. And worst of all, Donald Trump’s been elected president. On the first day of Maggie’s new gig, famous actress Lucy Horne visits the attorney Maggie works for and asks his office to discreetly investigate the murder of a fellow thespian—she points them toward a potential suspect, Steven Brinkley, a famous novelist. But Maggie’s struggling to hold it together, bouncing from Narcotics Anonymous meetings to spying on her ex to roaming the city, struggling to understand what’s happened to it—and the country—in the years she’s been distracted by addiction. Will she be able to stay sober? Work successfully with her new professional partner? Win back her family? And, on top of it all, catch a killer? Schulman (The Cosmopolitans, 2016, etc.) has written a free-wheeling novel that must surely be one of the first to juxtapose Trump-era politics with whodunit, and Maggie’s political ramblings, about everything from Black Lives Matter to gentrification, are as central to the novel as the case at its heart. But even though most of Schulman's readers will likely agree with the politics here, Maggie still seems more a platform than a protagonist; her character never quite coheres. After all, how realistic is a 21st-century New Yorker who doesn’t own a cellphone or know how to use the internet?

Schulman offers, with mixed success, a sprawling exploration of New York nostalgia, police brutality, addiction memoir, and queer love, with a mystery as the cherry on top.

Pub Date: Sept. 11, 2018

ISBN: 978-1-936932-39-9

Page Count: 280

Publisher: Feminist Press

Review Posted Online: July 1, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2018

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A CONSPIRACY OF BONES

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

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NORMAL PEOPLE

Absolutely enthralling. Read it.

Awards & Accolades

Likes

  • Readers Vote
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Our Verdict

  • Our Verdict
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  • Kirkus Reviews'
    Best Books Of 2019


  • New York Times Bestseller


  • IndieBound Bestseller

A young Irish couple gets together, splits up, gets together, splits up—sorry, can't tell you how it ends!

Irish writer Rooney has made a trans-Atlantic splash since publishing her first novel, Conversations With Friends, in 2017. Her second has already won the Costa Novel Award, among other honors, since it was published in Ireland and Britain last year. In outline it's a simple story, but Rooney tells it with bravura intelligence, wit, and delicacy. Connell Waldron and Marianne Sheridan are classmates in the small Irish town of Carricklea, where his mother works for her family as a cleaner. It's 2011, after the financial crisis, which hovers around the edges of the book like a ghost. Connell is popular in school, good at soccer, and nice; Marianne is strange and friendless. They're the smartest kids in their class, and they forge an intimacy when Connell picks his mother up from Marianne's house. Soon they're having sex, but Connell doesn't want anyone to know and Marianne doesn't mind; either she really doesn't care, or it's all she thinks she deserves. Or both. Though one time when she's forced into a social situation with some of their classmates, she briefly fantasizes about what would happen if she revealed their connection: "How much terrifying and bewildering status would accrue to her in this one moment, how destabilising it would be, how destructive." When they both move to Dublin for Trinity College, their positions are swapped: Marianne now seems electric and in-demand while Connell feels adrift in this unfamiliar environment. Rooney's genius lies in her ability to track her characters' subtle shifts in power, both within themselves and in relation to each other, and the ways they do and don't know each other; they both feel most like themselves when they're together, but they still have disastrous failures of communication. "Sorry about last night," Marianne says to Connell in February 2012. Then Rooney elaborates: "She tries to pronounce this in a way that communicates several things: apology, painful embarrassment, some additional pained embarrassment that serves to ironise and dilute the painful kind, a sense that she knows she will be forgiven or is already, a desire not to 'make a big deal.' " Then: "Forget about it, he says." Rooney precisely articulates everything that's going on below the surface; there's humor and insight here as well as the pleasure of getting to know two prickly, complicated people as they try to figure out who they are and who they want to become.

Absolutely enthralling. Read it.

Pub Date: April 16, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-984-82217-8

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Hogarth

Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019

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