In this latest adventure for Anita (The Wrath of Shiva, 2012, etc.), Oleksiw blends details about food, clothing and customs...
Murder in the mountains of southern India disrupts a close family.
Photographer Anita Ray and her mother’s younger sister, Meena, leave Meena’s Hotel Delite on the Indian coast to visit Anita’s other aunt, Lalita, in Kerala. Lalita has withdrawn from the north to her old family estate after her husband’s death, and her married daughter, Valli, is staying with her as well. Valli’s younger brother, Prakash, has also retreated to the house while he’s under scrutiny at the temple where he serves as an assistant priest. Even though Lalita brags about him and proposes him as a possible husband for the 30-year-old Anita, and even though Valli pretends to be happy with her own marriage, Anita senses that all is not well in the household. It’s the height of monsoon season in central Kerala. Wild animals from the nearby sanctuary are coming into the village, and Anita keeps catching nighttime glimpses of someone skulking outside the house. When she discovers a drowned body near the river, evidence points to murder rather than misadventure. Anita’s announcement of the killing distresses Parvati, a meek and gentle maidservant who has recently joined the household and, like the other people in the house, is not all she appears to be. When Anita pursues the mysteries within her own family, Lalita, Prakash and Valli all deny her accusations, get angry with her persistence and order her to stop meddling—until a violent incident proves Anita right.
In this latest adventure for Anita (The Wrath of Shiva, 2012, etc.), Oleksiw blends details about food, clothing and customs in southern India with family drama and just enough suspense to keep you reading.Pub Date: May 21, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4328-2856-1
Page Count: 266
Publisher: Five Star/Gale Cengage
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2014
A quick, fun read. Rowling delivers a set of characters every bit as durable as her Potter people and a story that, though...
Murderous muggles are up to no good, and it’s up to a seemingly unlikely hero to set things right.
The big news surrounding this pleasing procedural is that Galbraith, reputed former military policeman and security expert, is none other than J.K. Rowling, who presumably has no experience on the Afghan front or at Scotland Yard. Why the pseudonymous subterfuge? We may never know. What’s clear, and what matters, is that Galbraith/Rowling’s yarn is an expertly written exercise in both crime and social criticism of a piece with Rowling’s grown-up novel The Casual Vacancy (2012), even if her hero, private detective Cormoran Strike, bears a name that wouldn’t be out of place in her Harry Potter series. Strike is a hard-drinking, hard-bitten, lonely mess of a man, for reasons that Rowling reveals bit by bit, carefully revealing the secrets he keeps about his parentage, his time in battle and his bad luck. Strike is no Sherlock Holmes, but he’s a dogged pursuer of The Truth, in this instance the identity of the person who may or may not have relieved a supermodel of her existence most unpleasantly: “Her head had bled a little into the snow. The face was crushed and swollen, one eye reduced to a pucker, the other showing as a sliver of dull white between distended lids.” It’s an icky image, but no ickier than Rowling’s roundup of sinister, self-serving, sycophantic characters who inhabit the world of high fashion, among the most suspicious of them a fellow who’s—well, changed his name to pull something over on his audience (“It’s a long fucking way from Hackney, I can tell you...”). Helping Strike along as he turns over stones in the yards of the rich and famous is the eminently helpful Robin Ellacott, newcomer to London and determined to do better than work as a mere temp, which is what lands her at Strike’s door. The trope of rumpled detective and resourceful girl Friday is an old one, of course, but Rowling dusts it off and makes it new even as she turns London into a setting for her tale of mayhem as memorable as what Dashiell Hammett did with San Francisco in The Maltese Falcon.
A quick, fun read. Rowling delivers a set of characters every bit as durable as her Potter people and a story that, though no more complex than an Inspector Lewis episode, works well on every level.Pub Date: April 30, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-316-20684-6
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Mulholland Books/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2013
Lively scenes pop up here and there, but 500-plus pages will transmogrify most thrillers into a relentless march of...
Another parboiled offering from the poster boy of southern gothic thrillers (Blood Memory, 2005, etc.).
Natchez, Miss., a town that has seen rosier days, is about to get kicked while it’s down. Kate Townsend, shining light of her senior class—valedictorian, gorgeous, a double state champion (tennis and swimming) with a full scholarship to Harvard—has drowned. Her death is being linked to a pillar of the community, the estimable, beloved Dr. Drew Elliot, a husband and father who is 23 years Kate’s senior. Among the locals most seriously affected is upright, unselfish Penn Cage, Drew’s lifelong friend. A former prosecutor now considering a run for mayor, he’s asked to represent Drew, who confesses to an affair with Kate, which will surely place him in the vanguard of suspects if her death turns out to be foul play. Penn is shaken and thinks fleetingly of distancing himself from a situation that is certainly messy and potentially ruinous. He knows Natchez, and he knows how quickly its citizens can turn if they feel betrayed. Drew, however, is loyal, and a good guy’s got to do what a good guy’s got to do. As Penn pursues an investigation on Drew’s behalf, he discovers things about his friend, about Kate, about his town and about himself that will darken his view of civic responsibility.
Lively scenes pop up here and there, but 500-plus pages will transmogrify most thrillers into a relentless march of predictable events.Pub Date: Dec. 27, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-3471-5
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2005
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