A winning trifecta for cozy enthusiasts: a ghost story, a murder mystery, and a fresh romance.
A spirit supposedly haunts a run-down house in New Hampshire in this novel.
In Marini’s (Schmuel’s Journey, 2015, etc.) sequel, new couple Sam Miller and Martha Sanborn wonder why her brother, Bart, and his ne’er-do-well childhood friend Auggie Raymond bought the old “Ocean Born Mary House,” a firetrap in Henniker that has long stood vacant. The year is 1975, and the first-time homeowners explain they want to exploit the house’s alleged ghost, Mary Wilson Wallace, by offering tours and selling souvenirs to spirit hunters and academics interested in the occult. In 1720, Mary was born on an oceangoing ship off the coast of New England. Centuries later, people say her apparition inhabits the house. The storyline seesaws from 1975 to emerald-eyed Mary’s shipboard birth, her wedding, her death at age 94 in the Henniker house, and her descendants through three centuries. When a green-eyed woman claiming to be the secret illegitimate daughter of one of those descendants visits Bart, he fears his paranormal enterprise may experience a hiccup. Ghostly activity in the house causes nerves to jangle, but it’s the corpse in a pool of blood on the kitchen floor that produces true fear. Newborn Mary’s discovery on the ship by a pirate called Don Pedro, who allowed her and the others onboard to live as he and his men plundered the vessel, and various other past tales add richness to the story. But some historical accounts fall flat; when the elderly Don Pedro introduces himself to Mary when she is 68, there is little payoff. Italicizing is inconsistent—italics are used for internal monologues, emphasis, signage, correspondence, and event summaries. References to TV Detective Joe Friday working a case and the “aw-shucks grin” of actor Gary Cooper seem corny even in a book set in the mid-’70s, and the recap of the first installment of the series is clunky. But ghostly elements add shivers, and the reason for the murder provides a welcome twist. Another positive element: the realistic pains and promise of Martha and Sam’s new relationship.
A winning trifecta for cozy enthusiasts: a ghost story, a murder mystery, and a fresh romance.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-61950-312-0
Page Count: 191
Publisher: Gypsy Shadow Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 8, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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