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CROOKED LETTER, CROOKED LETTER

Name: CROOKED LETTER, CROOKED LETTER
Author: Tom Franklin
ISBN: 978-0-06-059466-4

by Tom Franklin ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 5, 2010

There’s little suspense in a novel that’s most notable for its heavy-handed treatment of race.

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There are murders in this Mississippi melodrama, but pay them no mind; its core is the brief friendship of two boys, one black, one white.

Larry Ott has been ostracized by the small town of Chabot for 25 years. Back in 1982, the white high-school student took his neighbor Cindy Walker out on a date. She was never seen again. The town assumed Larry had killed her, so though no body was found, no charges brought, Larry was punished. When the time came for Larry, a mechanic, to inherit his father’s shop, he had no customers. He survived by selling off parcels of the family’s woods to the timber company. Now, in 2007, another disappearance: the daughter of the company owner. While we’re absorbing this, a masked intruder shoots Larry on his porch. He survives, thanks to quick thinking by his erstwhile friend Silas Jones, a black man and the town’s only cop. Silas has been having a busy day: finding the decomposing body of a local drug dealer (not heard of again), removing a rattlesnake from a mailbox. These dramas share space with frequent flashbacks to the childhood of Larry and Silas. The result is a sluggish story, a surprise after Franklin’s two hell-for-leather historicals (Smonk, 2006, etc.). Silas and his mother once lived in a hunting cabin in the Ott woods. Larry taught Silas how to hunt and fish until a racial slur ended their friendship. Turns out Silas was also involved in Cindy’s disappearance, though absolutely not as her killer. There’s no lack of mysteries here, and no lack of red flags either, but other mysteries—of character—go unexamined. Why hasn’t Larry, instead of living like a zombie all these years, just left town? And why has Silas, after bigger assignments elsewhere, returned home to a nothing job?

There’s little suspense in a novel that’s most notable for its heavy-handed treatment of race.

Pub Date: Oct. 5, 2010

ISBN: 978-0-06-059466-4

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: July 14, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2010

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
MISSISSIPPI NOIR
edited by Tom Franklin

- BOOK REVIEW
THE TILTED WORLD
by Tom Franklin ; Beth Ann Fennelly

- BOOK REVIEW
SMONK
by Tom Franklin

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SUMMER ISLAND

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2001

The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...

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Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.

Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.

The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.

Pub Date: March 1, 2001

ISBN: 0-609-60737-5

Page Count: 336

Publisher: Crown

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE WOMEN
by Kristin Hannah

- BOOK REVIEW
THE FOUR WINDS
by Kristin Hannah

- BOOK REVIEW
THE GREAT ALONE
by Kristin Hannah

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LAST ORDERS

by Graham Swift ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 5, 1996

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Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.