An engaging mystery that needs a more compelling protagonist.
Murder and corruption add up for an investment whiz who is drawn into his hometown’s dark doings in this debut novel.
High schoolers Sam and Jake are childhood friends bound for different paths. All Sam wants to do is “go to a good college and get out of here”—here being the Berkshires in Massachusetts. The place has turned into a sin city à la Pottersville from It’s a Wonderful Life, rife with “greed, drug abuse, lack of leadership, and laziness.” Sam’s math acumen is his ticket out, and he gets a financial stake from venerable local Old Man Wesson that helps him to attend MIT on a full scholarship. Upon graduation, Wesson bankrolls an investment firm to be run by Sam and Bitchin’ Ralph, his best friend from MIT. Jake, meanwhile, is set up in the family business, which is running marijuana. He fled town following the death-by-nail-in-the-head of his Uncle Marvin. The two old friends are reunited when, after opening his firm, Sam receives a cashier’s check for $2 million with a note, “Make me some money.” Another check for $13 million follows. Soon after comes word that Jake has died. All roads lead back home, where a police officer leans a little too heavily on Sam, who begins to suspect something is rotten in the Berkshires as, when he is knocked unconscious, he hears a familiar voice say, “Sorry, buddy.” Lytes’ first installment of a series has fine writing, such as this gripping opening line: “When I saw Jake’s Uncle Marvin, who had a tenpenny nail in his forehead, chasing Jake, I knew what was happening.” The author also writes with a strong sense of place. The Berkshires region, with its wide-open fields, is an ideal location for burying things someone doesn’t want found. Characterizations and plotting could use sharpening, though (and the author spells Willie Nelson’s iconic name “Willy Nelson”). Sam retains his naïveté throughout, which strains credulity, especially in the case of Belinda, Jake’s beautiful older sister, who plays—a bit obviously to readers—the role of femme fatale. Sam never appears to really wise up, even in a climactic moment when Belinda has a gun pointed at his side.
An engaging mystery that needs a more compelling protagonist.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 404
Publisher: Manuscript
Review Posted Online: Jan. 30, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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