A beautifully understated portrait of a hero who’s a lot better at grieving than detecting.
The 1970s come back to life—and not in a nice way—in this year’s winner of the St. Martin’s Press/Malice Domestic Best First Traditional Mystery Novel Contest.
Tim Ryder’s days as a student radical ended abruptly when he joined several friends in a bank robbery intended to provide funding for a fringe Presidential candidate. Predictably, the robbery went bad, leaving two people dead and sending Tim and Glenn Turret, the ringleader, to prison. Now Tim’s put all that behind him, or so he thinks. He makes a respectable living as a North Palm Springs woodworker, and his wife Deirdre, a former addict who’s been clean for years, works as a substance abuse counselor. One hot Sunday morning Tim takes his coffee out to his front yard and finds a corpse on his lawn. The young man has clearly been shot in the head, but nothing else about his death is clear—not the reason he came to the quiet desert community, not his connection to Tim, not even his name. When he finds a telltale scrap of evidence in the street, Tim foolishly decides to pursue it himself instead of turning it over to overbearing Inspector Branson, whose sole contribution to the case has been to announce that Turret’s just been released from prison. Soon Tim’s new life has been shattered as completely as his old.
A beautifully understated portrait of a hero who’s a lot better at grieving than detecting.Pub Date: May 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-312-36441-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Dunne/Minotaur
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2007
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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