Thoughtful and exciting—another fine mystery from Horn.
In this second outing of a strong mystery series, a nursing home murder sparks an investigation into the past of a former circus wrestler and Olympian.
Eight years after the events in The Pumpkin Eater (2013), it’s 2007, and Sam Dawson is still photographing old cemeteries for coffee-table books, this time focusing on Deep Lake, Minnesota. When he arrives with his vintage Airstream, he decides to take his dog to visit the Whispering Pines Care Center and perhaps snap some photos of residents (he’s getting bored with cemeteries). But Aimee Pond, the nursing supervisor, is thornily unfriendly, and the local sheriff is more so, particularly after an old woman is found murdered at the nursing home, putting Sam under suspicion. Interspersed with the 2007 story are flashbacks jumping back and forth through the memories of Whispering Pines resident Hans Gottlieb, who’s nearly 100 years old. Hans’ son Will knows almost nothing of his father’s life except that he worked on the railroad. But Hans has many secrets, including having been a champion athlete and masked carnival wrestler. His curiosity piqued by the mysteries swirling around Deep Lake, and for his own sake, Sam must find answers while also settling the question of what to do next professionally. Horn, in his third novel, again demonstrates the intelligence and complexity of the first Sam Dawson mystery, elevating the story beyond the usual detective business of clues, evidence, hidden connections, and suspects. Many pieces do fall into place at last but more for the reader than for Sam. An intriguing theme pervades the novel: the impossibility of truly reconstructing the pasts of those who become lost to us through time or dementia. Even our own parents are essentially opaque: “At best, we only see glimpses of who they really were,” Aimee says. Added to this is our desire to be deceived, which the carnival scenes colorfully illuminate. Horn’s characterization goes deep, and he paces events well, saving some surprising revelations for the end.
Thoughtful and exciting—another fine mystery from Horn.Pub Date: Oct. 29, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-9835894-5-7
Page Count: -
Publisher: Granite Peak Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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