A cozy whodunit that makes Granite Cove a congenial place for readers to visit.
A reporter in a small New England town investigates a series of murders tied to a local old-age home in Cook’s (A Nose for Hanky Panky, 2014, etc.) third Granite Cove mystery.
Rose McNichols is a local newspaper reporter and, in her spare time, a stand-up comic. One afternoon, her comedy gig at the Shady Nook Retirement Home is interrupted when Greta Dupnik, one of the patients, is found dead in her bed, crushed by an overturned bookcase. Greta’s roommate, Mabel Smithwick, says that the death was not an accident. She also believes that she, Mabel, was the intended victim—because she was an eyewitness to another murder several months before. Intrepid reporter that she is, Rose decides to look into Mabel’s allegations. It becomes clear that there’s something to them, because it isn’t long before Mabel is dead, too. All signs point to the involvement of Mabel’s wealthy family—her wastrel son, Edmund Jr.; his late-life wife, Sonia; and Sonia’s son from a previous marriage, Otto Gurwitz, a cartoonist with an internet following. But murder isn’t the only thing that Rose has on her plate; there’s also her romance with a talented musician named Kevin Healey and a flirtation with Forester Fairbank, a newcomer to Granite Cove who books her to perform at an old garage that he’s turned into a club. The author has written a very low-key mystery that’s set to the slower rhythms of small-town life. Along the way, readers get plenty of local color and many vivid local characters, several of whom are suspects in the mystery plot. Whether it’s a newspaper office or an old-age home, the author manages to inject a convincing sense of reality into her imaginary settings. And even if Rose isn’t the world’s greatest stand-up comic, she still manages to show how resourceful she is in bringing a killer to justice. Now, if only she could remember the punch line to that pantyhose joke.
A cozy whodunit that makes Granite Cove a congenial place for readers to visit.Pub Date: May 29, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-692-72206-0
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Neptune Rising Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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