by Tod Goldberg ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 2001
As in the film A Beautiful Mind, our deepening awareness of the hero’s madness is the main plot. But Paul is not Russell...
Goldberg rises above the sleazy glamour of his well-received debut (Fake Liar Cheat, 2000) and takes a far deeper cut into his material.
In Los Angeles, anthropologist Paul Luden gets a call from Bruce Duper, his neighbor on Granite Lake in upcoast Washington. Paul’s separated wife Molly has disappeared from their lonesome cabin. Their boat is docked, the cabin’s front door locked. Where’s Molly? Now in his mid-30s, Paul drives up with his new love, Ginny, 19, his navel-ringed student, whose insecure, demanding dialogue Goldberg captures dead-on. We hear about Paul’s parents and his pathetic losses with Molly. Paul and Molly, it seems, should never have married, both being manic-depressive (details about their illness are doled out slowly), but at least Molly’s body knows more than they do: it aborts one fetus, has another rupture her fallopian tube, and finally creates a monster with the one child she does bear, Katrina, a beautiful little dying girl with brain and body tumors which in themselves harbor. . . . Since childhood, Paul’s illness has had him drawing inner organs and bones of pigs and other animals—now he’s a bone-smart anthropologist. A large part of the story’s charms are Paul’s very, very big thoughts about the descent of man from a single cell—the mind of an anthropologist viewing his family’s wink of existence. When Katrina dies, Paul madly draws her inner organs, tumors (and what’s inside them), while under the delusion that he can plant her cells in the earth or lake and have them regrow. But now where’s Molly gone? His dead smolder inside him, flare up and sear—and is Molly or Katrina the title character?
As in the film A Beautiful Mind, our deepening awareness of the hero’s madness is the main plot. But Paul is not Russell Crowe, and our ties with him weaken the more we learn. Still, strong stuff as the world wavers.Pub Date: May 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-56947-284-X
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Soho
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2002
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by J.A. Jance ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 2, 2019
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
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A convicted killer’s list of five people he wants dead runs the gamut from the wife he’s already had murdered to franchise heroine Ali Reynolds.
Back in the day, women came from all over to consult Santa Clarita fertility specialist Dr. Edward Gilchrist. Many of them left his care happily pregnant, never dreaming that the father of the babies they carried was none other than the physician himself, who donated his own sperm rather than that of the handsome, athletic, disease-free men pictured in his scrapbook. When Alexandra Munsey’s son, Evan, is laid low by the kidney disease he’s inherited from his biological father and she returns to Gilchrist in search of the donor’s medical records, the roof begins to fall in on him. By the time it’s done falling, he’s serving a life sentence in Folsom Prison for commissioning the death of his wife, Dawn, the former nurse and sometime egg donor who’d turned on him. With nothing left to lose, Gilchrist tattoos himself with the initials of five people he blames for his fall: Dawn; Leo Manuel Aurelio, the hit man he’d hired to dispose of her; Kaitlyn Todd, the nurse/receptionist who took Dawn’s place; Alex Munsey, whose search for records upset his apple cart; and Ali Reynolds, the TV reporter who’d helped put Alex in touch with the dozen other women who formed the Progeny Project because their children looked just like hers. No matter that Ali’s been out of both California and the news business for years; Gilchrist and his enablers know that revenge can’t possibly be served too cold. Wonder how far down that list they’ll get before Ali, aided once more by Frigg, the methodical but loose-cannon AI first introduced in Duel to the Death (2018), turns on them?
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how little the boundary-challenged AI, who gets into the case more or less inadvertently, differs from your standard human sidekick with issues.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5101-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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by Lorna Barrett ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 13, 2019
An anodyne visit with Tricia and her friends and enemies hung on a thin mystery.
Too much free time leads a New Hampshire bookseller into yet another case of murder.
Now that Tricia Miles has Pixie Poe and Mr. Everett practically running her bookstore, Haven’t Got a Clue, she finds herself at loose ends. Her wealthy sister, Angelica, who in the guise of Nigela Ricita has invested heavily in making Stoneham a bookish tourist attraction, is entering the amateur competition for the Great Booktown Bake-Off. So Tricia, who’s recently taken up baking as a hobby, decides to join her and spends a lot of time looking for the perfect cupcake recipe. A visit to another bookstore leaves Tricia witnessing a nasty argument between owner Joyce Widman and next-door neighbor Vera Olson over the trimming of tree branches that hang over Joyce’s yard—also overheard by new town police officer Cindy Pearson. After Tricia accepts Joyce’s offer of some produce from her garden, they find Vera skewered by a pitchfork, and when Police Chief Grant Baker arrives, Joyce is his obvious suspect. Ever since Tricia moved to Stoneham, the homicide rate has skyrocketed (Poisoned Pages, 2018, etc.), and her history with Baker is fraught. She’s also become suspicious about the activities at Pets-A-Plenty, the animal shelter where Vera was a dedicated volunteer. Tricia’s offered her expertise to the board, but president Toby Kingston has been less than welcoming. With nothing but baking on her calendar, Tricia has plenty of time to investigate both the murder and her vague suspicions about the shelter. Plenty of small-town friendships and rivalries emerge in her quest for the truth.
An anodyne visit with Tricia and her friends and enemies hung on a thin mystery.Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-9848-0272-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2019
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