Authoritative settings—Chazin is married to a veteran firefighter—and an extremely likable heroine are enough to survive...
Spunky Fire Marshal Georgia Sheehan copes with a vengeful arsonist, a rocky love affair, a thorny career path, and tainted brass—in a satisfying sequel to last year’s The Fourth Angel.
Two doctors, known to each other, are killed by fires set in their respective homes only hours apart—puzzling fires, the precise causes not immediately apparent. But it isn’t until Georgia learns more about how the docs were connected that she gets that first unsettling whiff of arson. Before retirement, both doctors served on the One-B Board, a panel viewed darkly throughout the New York City Fire Department for the austerity of its dealings with compensation matters. Further, her veteran partner informs her, both were notorious “for turning down injured firefighters for line-of-duty pensions.” The idea that one of those rejected might be seeking vigilante justice is difficult to avoid. Nonetheless, Georgia learns that it’s an idea anathema to several of her bosses for reasons that have to do with the way power corrupts. Soon enough, she’s bumping into secret agendas every which way, and people who care about her are lining up to warn her off. Moving discreetly—she does understand that her career is at stake—she takes awhile to uncover the cover-up, but in the meantime there are all those auxiliary worries heaped on her plate. Like, for instance, the fact that she might be pregnant. Then, suddenly, Georgia’s investigation, sub rosa as much of it is, takes a violent twist in a terrifying direction and she finds herself hunting for a vanished best friend, hoping desperately that she’s still alive, and, if she isn’t, that the murderer isn’t who Georgia’s scared stiff it might be.
Authoritative settings—Chazin is married to a veteran firefighter—and an extremely likable heroine are enough to survive even a wildly melodramatic climax.Pub Date: May 13, 2002
ISBN: 0-399-14850-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.
“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-55634-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
PROFILES
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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