Though there’s no time to linger over most of the rapidly sketched characters, White (The Program, 2001, etc.) runs the...
The suspense-filled curtain-raiser, the discovery of the Boulder District Attorney’s corpse, provides one of the few quiet moments in clinical psychologist Alan Gregory’s latest bomb-enriched thriller.
Until somebody bashed him to death while his bedridden wife lay helpless upstairs, Royal Peterson was the boss of Alan’s wife Lauren Crowder, who’s just about to come off maternity leave to resume her normal life as an ADA with multiple sclerosis when the news comes in. It’s followed by still more shocking news from Alan’s old friend, police detective Sam Purdy: The prime suspect is Sam’s partner Lucy Tanner, whose fingerprints have turned up on the murder weapon. In the meantime, however, Alan’s on the verge of the biggest shock of all. His new patient, unlikable Naomi Bigg, keeps hinting that her son, outraged at the slap on the wrist the criminal-justice system gave his sister Marin’s rapist and the heavy prison term meted out to his father when he tried to take the law into his own hands, has joined forces with his mysterious pal Ramp, still seeking revenge for his mother’s killing by a paroled murderer, to get back at all the functionaries who betrayed Marin Bigg and Denise Ramp. Could those functionaries have included Roy Peterson—and could they include Lauren herself? Alan’s got precious little time to consider the moral quiddities of breaking doctor-patient confidentiality to disclose the existence of a powerful new suspect in the Peterson case, because Ramp’s about to go ballistic with a series of explosions that will send the case screaming out of the mystery category into the trajectory of the greased-lightning thriller—until the disturbingly quiet coda that bookends the tale reveals the final nasty secret.
Though there’s no time to linger over most of the rapidly sketched characters, White (The Program, 2001, etc.) runs the whole gamut from whodunit to duck-and-cover.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 2002
ISBN: 0-385-33618-7
Page Count: 419
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2001
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.
“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-55634-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
PROFILES
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
© Copyright 2026 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.
