A breezy, if flawed, debut that promises better things to come.
A fugitive attorney gets a new lease on life after faking his own death in Fleury’s debut crime novel.
Alton Carver is a bad man who’s just stolen $3 million. He’s the kind of guy who parks his Porsche across two spaces to avoid damage to the paint; now, he’s about to fabricate a fatal boating accident, leaving his wife, Nicole, and 4-year-old daughter, Clara, to pick up the pieces back home in Florida while he spends his days in Costa Rica. The plan is to reveal the truth to his wife a few years down the line. After he pilots his 26-foot Island Runner five miles into the ocean, sets it on fire, and kayaks to safety, he shaves his head, adopts a fake mustache, and returns home to witness his own wake—and then sees a strange man pawing his wife. He won’t leave town until he finds out what’s going on, so he sets about “haunting” his family (by secretly entering the house and making himself coffee, for instance). Meanwhile, the insurance company won’t pay out to Nicole, the police are sniffing around, and little Clara thinks she’s seeing her dead father. When Clara later goes missing, it puts Alton and Nicole on a collision course that will end with someone dead. With first-person narration duties largely split between Alton and Nicole, Fleury’s debut seems pacier than it is, promising an engaging noir story that never fully materializes. Alton’s procrastination, which takes up a fair chunk of the book, reads as a lack of authorial confidence; it also makes the book feel like a novella’s worth of story padded out to novel length. Overall, Fleury’s characters remain frustratingly underdeveloped. Alton’s embezzlement, for example, is merely a contrivance for him to fake his own demise, and his decision to linger is implausible. Nicole, meanwhile, is little more than a barely present mother and cheating wife with a penchant for wine. Luckily, Fleury has a brisk writing style and an ear for characters’ voices. This helps paper over the cracks and ultimately makes the book an enjoyable read.
A breezy, if flawed, debut that promises better things to come.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9991653-0-0
Page Count: 270
Publisher: Erik Spencer Fleury
Review Posted Online: Nov. 26, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
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