THE FIVE-FORTY-FIVE TO CANNES

Name: THE FIVE-FORTY-FIVE TO CANNES
Author: Tess Uriza Holthe
ISBN: 978-0-307-35185-2

by Tess Uriza Holthe ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 8, 2007

With Maeve Binchy’s talent for interconnected stories, and her tendency toward the sentimental, Holthe is not afraid to...

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Holthe shifts from the World War II–era Filipino setting of her richly original debut novel (When the Elephants Dance, 2001) to the contemporary Riviera in this novel of linked stories about characters whose lives jostle and sometimes collide along the French-Italian train line to Cannes.

In the opening story, the collision is literal. Chazz, a troubled, wealthy American, is fatally struck by a car outside the train station. He has been physically running away from two train hustlers, but on a deeper level he has been running from his fear that his wife Claudette is about to end their marriage. Chazz’s death is witnessed by an elderly French Jewess whose son’s heart was broken ten years earlier when his fiancée Claudette ran off with Chazz. Meanwhile, the two train hustlers’ younger brother, GianCarlo, yearns for a normal adolescence and attempts to escape the criminal life. Hoping he has already escaped that life is the local ferry pilot, an ex-con who has been raising a little boy named Claudio as his grandchild ever since Claudio appeared, the scars of previous abuse evident, on his doorstep. Hopelessly hopeful, Claudio and GianCarlo, who have their own interactions, face dark fates that readers will find themselves caring about long after the book’s more sophisticated broken hearts fade. One such broken heart is Sophie, a young photographer who once photographed Chazz. On the coast shooting pictures of a famous Italian chef, Sophie finds herself the fourth corner of a romantic triangle when she becomes involved with the chef’s brother, who is in love with the chef’s wife. In the final story, Chazz’s widow Claudette shows up to tie together the love triangles, mixed messages between lovers and lost opportunities.

With Maeve Binchy’s talent for interconnected stories, and her tendency toward the sentimental, Holthe is not afraid to enter darker the waters in which her characters sometimes swim but often drown. A talent to watch.

Pub Date: May 8, 2007

ISBN: 978-0-307-35185-2

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Crown

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2007

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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TREE OF SMOKE

by Denis Johnson ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 2007

It’s more than coincidence that the novel features two sets of relatives whose blood ties are once removed, for the family...

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Within the current political climate, the reader might expect a new novel about the war in Vietnam to provide a metaphor for Iraq. Yet Denis Johnson has bigger whales to land in his longest and most ambitious work to date. Tree of Smoke is less concerned with any individual war than with the nature of war, and with the essence of war novels. There are echoes here of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (particularly as transformed by Francis Ford Coppola into Apocalypse Now) and Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, yet Johnson’s achievement suggests that each generation gets the war—and the war novel—it deserves.

At the center of Johnson’s epic sprawl is Colonel Francis Sands, the novel’s Captain Ahab, a character of profound, obsessive complexity and contradiction. Is he visionary or madman, patriot or traitor? Dead or alive? Or, somehow, all of the above? Because the reader perceives the Colonel (as he is reverently known) through the eyes of other characters, he shimmers like a kaleidoscope of shifting impressions. His military involvement in Asia preceded Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, and he has continued to operate as a CIA agent within the shadows of Vietnam, while perhaps answering to no authority higher than his own.
From World War II through the war in Vietnam, much has changed—allegiances and alliances, public sentiment, the modes of modern warfare. Yet the Colonel hasn’t—he won’t or he can’t. Though he is plainly the novel’s pivotal figure, Johnson spends more time inside the psyche of the Colonel’s nephew, William “Skip” Sands, whose father died in action and whose enlistment extends a family tradition. He’s as naïve as the Colonel is worldly, as filled with self-doubt as his uncle is free of it, but he ultimately joins his relative in psychological operations against the enemy—whomever that may be. Eventually, he must decide whether it is possible to serve both his legendary relative and his country.
A less engaging subplot concerns half-brothers Bill and James Houston, who enter the war as teenagers to escape their dead-end lives in Arizona. Where the Sands family operates on the periphery of the war, the Houstons are deep in the muck of it. Though they are what once might have been called cannon fodder, the war gives their lives definition and a sense of mission, of destiny, that is missing back home—which will never again feel like home after Vietnam.

It’s more than coincidence that the novel features two sets of relatives whose blood ties are once removed, for the family that one chooses is ultimately more important than the family into which one happens to be born. Thus it is all the more imperative to choose wisely—and all the more difficult, given the duplicity that the war seems to require for self-preservation. As the novel obliterates all distinctions between good and evil, allies and enemies, loyalty and betrayal, it sustains the suspense of who will survive long enough to have the last word.

Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2007

ISBN: 978-0-374-27912-7

Page Count: 624

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2007

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION

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MURDER AT THE TAFFY SHOP

by Maddie Day ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 31, 2020

The romantic doings of the likable characters are more interesting than the mediocre mystery.

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A bike shop owner and her book club pals keep solving mysteries in ways that somehow don’t endear them to the police (Murder on Cape Cod, 2018, etc.).

Mackenzie Almeida, the proprietor of Mac’s Bikes in the touristy Cape Cod town of Westham, is dating Tim Brunelle, the caring and handsome owner of an artisanal bakery, who wants to get married and start a family. That’s not something independent neat freak Mac is ready to do. She enjoys living in her tiny house with Belle, her talkative parrot, for company. When Mac and her best friend, Gin, come across the dead body of wealthy Beverly Ruchart outside Gin’s taffy shop, Mac’s romantic problems get put on the back burner, especially since Gin is a suspect. She and her date, Eli Tubin, the widower of Beverly’s daughter, had attended a party at Beverly’s home only the night before. Beverly seems to have died from a heart attack, but an autopsy finds that she was poisoned with antifreeze, some of which has been planted in Gin’s garage. Of course Mac and her cohorts at the book club can’t resist a little sleuthing. They uncover several other plausible suspects: Beverly’s ne’er-do-well grandson, Ron, his Russian girlfriend, and his long-absent father, who has a police record. Although Beverly could be generous, she had a sharp tongue that made her plenty of enemies. Her interest in genealogy and reuniting long-lost parents and children endeared her to Wesley Farnham, for whom she found a son, but not so much to Farnham’s daughter, who misses being an only child. Although Mac turns her findings over to the police, she still attracts the killer’s notice and ends up owing her life to Belle.

The romantic doings of the likable characters are more interesting than the mediocre mystery.