Juiceless, uninspired, routine: Woods’s worst yet.
Hit-or-miss thrillermeister Woods (The Short Forever, p. 140, etc.) misses big-time with this tale of a real-estate developer who’s executing the competition, and everybody else in sight, in Police Chief Holly Barker’s beloved Orchid Beach.
Expecting lively interest in the Palmetto Gardens property the feds had seized from a drug-laundering operation, the General Services Administration gets deadly interest instead: Two likely bidders drop out of the action when they’re shot dead, and the shooter just misses the only surviving bidder whose offer is acceptable, orchid-growing retiree Ed Shine, as he’s enjoying a get-acquainted nightcap with Holly and her father Ham (Orchid Blues, 2001, etc.). Exequies for the departed are cut short by Holly’s discovery of a clandestine listening device in her place. Though it’s never clear what the bugger hoped to learn, his identity as Fort Lauderdale locksmith Carlos Alvarez is revealed when his corpse is dumped in the Indian River, conveniently in Holly’s jurisdiction. Since the identity of the trigger man is obvious and that of his paymaster scarcely less so, there’s nothing to do but watch (1) Holly’s turf battles with her old FBI friend Harry Crisp, (2) Holly’s between-the-sheets wrestling with her new FBI friend Grant Early, and (3) Holly’s participation in a slaughter that soon rises like a Saturn rocket as the conspirators try to cover up for their lack of secrecy and finesse by killing everybody they’ve ever met. (Orchid Beach’s Chief of Police is responsible for two of the ten casualties before a bomb sends the body count spiraling out of sight.) Even if edenic Orchid Beach is “the way Florida should have turned out, but didn’t,” it’s hard to break a sweat worrying about the deaths of so many faceless felons and their associates in the absence of mystery, suspense, or any complications other than where to put the body bags.
Juiceless, uninspired, routine: Woods’s worst yet.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-399-14929-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2002
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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