by Stuart M. Kaminsky ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 12, 1995
After his wife is stabbed to death during a bungled burglary attempt, Saginaw Park investment-broker Harvey Rozier asks that Sgt. Abe Lieberman be assigned to the case—even though Rozier murdered his wife himself and lives in fear that Lieberman will track down the hapless burglar who interrupted the killing. And he's not alone in his fear. While the witness, rabbity burglar and Sunday painter George (Pitty-Pitty) Patniks, hides under the covers from Rozier and the cops, Dr. Jacob Berry—the new Uptown Chicago police physician—cowers in his office with his illegal handgun, terrified of three teenagers who taunted him from a nearby el platform. And Lieberman's partner, Bill Hanrahan, who's bent on breaking Rozier's careful alibi, feels the heat from a Chinatown elder determined to keep him from marrying Iris Chen. The only comic relief comes on the home front, when Lieberman and his wife find their home invaded by a neighboring rabbi obsessed with buying the place now, right now, tonight. Another stellar performance, alight with menace and compassion; and if it's not up to the lonely heights of Lieberman's Day (1994), very few procedurals are. The biggest mystery: Why isn't this outstanding series, now in its fourth book, pulling in the vast audience abandoned by Harry Kemelman's Rabbi Small?
Pub Date: April 12, 1995
ISBN: 0-8050-2576-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1995
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by Jacqueline Winspear ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 1, 2003
Prime candidate for a TV movie.
A romance/investigation debut novel set firmly in the spiritual aftermath of WWI.
Maisie Dobbs, recently turned private investigator in 1929 England, had been a nurse back during the war to end all wars, so she knows about wounds—both those to the body and those to the soul. It’s just a month after she sets up shop that she gets her first interesting case: What initially looks like just another infidelity matter turns out to be a woman’s preoccupation with a dead man, Vincent Weathershaw, in a graveyard. Flashback to Maisie’s upbringing: her transition from servant class to the intellectual class when she shows interest in the works of Hume, Kierkegaard, and Jung. She doesn’t really get to explore her girlhood until she makes some roughshod friends in the all-woman ambulance corps that serves in France, and she of course falls for a soldier, Simon, who writes her letters but then disappears. Now, in 1929, Maisie’s investigation into Vincent Weathershaw leads her to the mysterious Retreat, run like a mix between a barracks and a monastery, where soldiers still traumatized by the war go to recover. Maisie knows that her curiosity just might get her into trouble—yet she trusts her instincts and sends an undercover assistant into the Retreat in the hopes of finding out more about Vincent. But what will happen, she worries, if one needs to retreat from the Retreat? Will she discover the mystery behind her client’s wife’s preoccupation with a man who spent time there? And by any chance, albeit slight, might she encounter that old lover who disappeared back in 1917 and who she worried might be dead? Winspear rarely attempts to elevate her prose past the common romance, and what might have been a journey through a strata of England between the wars is instead just simple, convenient and contrived.
Prime candidate for a TV movie.Pub Date: July 1, 2003
ISBN: 1-56947-330-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Soho
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2003
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by Joanne Fluke ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2006
Fluke lavishes so much attention on the mechanics of location shooting that there’s scant time for the murder, much less its...
Even the murder of its cranky director can’t stop the filming of Crisis in Cherrywood or halt the snooping of Lake Eden’s premier baker.
Just when Hannah Swenson’s decided to accept neither of the marriage proposals tendered at the end of Peach Cobbler Murder (2005)—turning down both sweet-tempered dentist Norman Rhoades and hot-blooded lawman Mike Kingston—another suitor turns up. Her old college classmate Ross Barton, now a Hollywood producer who thinks Lake Eden is just the spot to shoot his new movie, recruits Hannah’s mom Delores as set designer, her younger sister Michelle as production assistant and her middle sister Andrea as an extra. He even casts Andrea’s five-year-old, Tracey, to play heroine Lynne Larchmont as a child and presses Hannah’s cat Moishe into service as her childhood pet. For Hannah he reserves the role of constant companion, escorting her to dinner, inviting her to view the dailies and letting her watch the filming—which gives her a front-row seat as Dean Lawrence, instructing leading man Anson Burke on how to use a prop pistol, shoots himself fatally instead. Since Mike has made it clear to Hannah that she must leave investigating to the professionals, she can’t investigate, she can only snoop—much to the delight of Andrea, Norman and Lake Edenites everywhere.
Fluke lavishes so much attention on the mechanics of location shooting that there’s scant time for the murder, much less its solution.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-7582-0294-6
Page Count: 356
Publisher: Kensington
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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