While the melodrama fails to ignite, Miller captures all the complicated nuances of a family in crisis.
As a series of fires in a small New Hampshire town exposes tensions between summer and year-round residents, the members of one in-between family confront their own desires, limitations and capacities to love in Miller's latest (The Lake Shore Limited, 2010, etc.).
Burned out on her transient life working for an NGO in Africa, Frankie takes a possibly permanent leave and comes to stay with her parents, Sylvia and Alfie, in Pomeroy, N.H., where they have recently retired after years of summering there. The night of Frankie’s arrival coincides with the town’s first house fire, which everyone assumes was an accident. Days later, at the annual Fourth of July tea, Frankie begins a flirtation with Bud, who runs Pomeroy’s newspaper, and accompanies him to the site of the fire so he can take pictures. When a second fire occurs, again at a home belonging to summer residents, Bud begins to wonder if arson is involved. Soon there are more fires—at least six—and Bud is actively covering the story. Frankie becomes more involved than she’d like after realizing she may have seen the arsonist’s car the night of the first fire. Her description helps lead to an arrest. As the investigation meanders—one of the least exciting detective stories ever—Frankie and Bud begin falling in love, though both are in their 40s and on different life paths. But the heart of the story really lies in Sylvia and Alfie’s marriage. For years, seemingly super-competent Sylvia has been secretly dissatisfied with her marriage to self-important but only moderately successful college professor Alfie. Now Alfie’s mind is failing and she’s stuck caring for him. Miller’s portrayal of early Alzheimer’s and the toll it takes on a family is disturbingly accurate and avoids the sentimental uplift prevalent in issue-oriented fiction. Any spouse who has been there will recognize Sylvia’s guilt, anger, protectiveness and helplessness as she watches Alfie deteriorate.
While the melodrama fails to ignite, Miller captures all the complicated nuances of a family in crisis.Pub Date: June 24, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-307-59479-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: April 16, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014
Texas Jewboy Kinky Friedman (Elvis, Jesus, and Coca-Cola, 1993) gets back to his non-Hebraic roots when he leaves Manhattan for a summer taking care of laundry and security at his father's kids' camp outside San Antonio. The lazy camp life gives Kinky enough time for pregnant dialogues with Dusty the talking cat and for plenty of his trademark anecdotes and aphorisms (``When you have to talk to a cat that isn't there, you might as well be talking to yourself''), but the Hon. Pat Knox, who ran successfully against Kinky years ago to become Kerrville's Justice of the Peace, is sure there's skullduggery in the neighborhood too. Five old ladies in the surrounding hamlets all died on their 76th birthdays; she's convinced they were murdered. The only clues: a series of yellow roses on each victim's grave; Pat's baffling intuition that all five widows were raped; and a dream reported by Violet Crabb, whose late sister Myrtle appeared out of the flames with an oracular utterance, ``Cotillion.'' In his lackadaisical pursuit of truth and justice, the Kinkster spends time with a sharp-tongued crafts counselor, a beekeeping survivalist, and the surviving Daughters of the Republic of Texas—he also uses a lot of words like ``ambivalent'' and ``concomitantly.'' Kinky's naughty charm is as potent as ever, but the uninitiated may find the lightweight mystery swamped, like a Thanksgiving dinner, by too much homecoming, too much childhood nostalgia, and too many fatty trimmings. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Sept. 14, 1994
ISBN: 0-671-86923-X
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1994
Pet-store owner Robin Light (Chutes and Adders, 1994) has always been jealous of her ``rich beauty queen'' friend Lynn Stanley, but no morenot since she followed Lynn to an abandoned house and found her friend hunched over the dead body of a stranger. And less and less is Lynn enviable, as she confesses to the murder, and her brother Ken tells Robin that she already killed somebody else as a child. Since the current victim, Brandon Douglas, has been nosing around Syracuse, looking for whoever killed his own sister, Janet Tyler, ten years agoeven though Janet's cousin Matt Lipsyle confessed to that murder and has been doing time ever sincethe atmosphere is heavy, not with unsolved crimes, but with too-solved crimes. As if Robin didn't have her hands full enough tangling with confessed killers and the unfriendly local police, she has to deal back at the pet shop with a puppy she rescued from another sneering suspect and a missing tarantula whose favorite dinner is tropical birds. Surprisingly, the pert Robin, in her second case, keeps her head even while she's rushing from one overgalvanized scene to the nextall en route to a thoroughly logical denouement featuring the one suspect who's never confessed to a thing.
Pub Date: July 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-8217-4989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Kensington
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1995
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