The connections, in fact, are unsurprising and anticlimactic, especially after the long buildup. But Rozan pulls off a group...
After eight mysteries mining the complicated relationship between private eyes Lydia Chin and Bill Smith (the Edgar-winning Winter and Night, 2002, etc.), Rozan makes her crossover bid with an ambitious study of a 9/11 hero’s clay feet.
First in, last out was the rule for firefighting Capt. James McCaffery, who true to his own longstanding form perished on the 44th floor of the World Trade Center while struggling to help still more of the wounded to safety. But was Jimmy McCaffery really a hero in his private life? Burned-out New York Tribune reporter Harry Randall says he wasn’t in a series of articles terminated by his plunge from the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge. Everybody accepts the obvious explanation of suicide except Laura Stone, Harry’s protegee and lover, who vows to continue his investigation of why the McCaffery Memorial Fund, headed by Jimmy’s old friend Marian Gallagher, refused a $50,000 contribution from reputed mobster Eddie Spano, another figure from Jimmy’s childhood. After a masterfully rapid exposition, Laura’s inquiries, bolstered by dozens of moving flashbacks, move crabwise from the Trade Center bombing to focus on the 1979 shooting of Jimmy’s friend Jack Molloy by still another friend, Mark Keegan, who was killed in prison a few months after confessing, leaving behind a son who’d grow up to be a firefighter wounded on 9/11. What did the papers Harry claimed Jimmy had left behind reveal about that fatal episode, and what does the troubled past of Jimmy’s childhood circle have to do with the historic moment that revealed Jimmy as both heroic and corrupt?
The connections, in fact, are unsurprising and anticlimactic, especially after the long buildup. But Rozan pulls off a group portrait that’s both grandly scaled and painfully intimate. It’s a pleasure to see all the stuff she’s been hoarding over those ten years with her p.i. duo.Pub Date: Oct. 5, 2004
ISBN: 0-385-33803-1
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2004
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.
Pub Date: April 5, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-41224-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
