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SÃO PAULO NOIR

Name: SÃO PAULO NOIR
Author: Tony Bellotto
ISBN: 978-1-61775-531-6

edited by Tony Bellotto ; translated by Clifford E. Landers ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 5, 2018

In the year of #MeToo, Bellotto’s Akashic entry has a timely feel, giving noir a host of feminine faces.

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Bellotto has no trouble discovering dark doings in what he describes as “the most populous city in Brazil, the Americas, the Portuguese-speaking world, and the entire Southern Hemisphere.”

São Paulo’s size and diversity give this volume’s 14 storytellers room to roam. There’s tony but fading Ciadade Jardim, where Amelinha lives out her declining years with the help of her maid in Ilana Casoy’s “Boniclaide and Mrs. Als.” And there’s modern, fast-paced Mooca, where Jô Soares’ detective probes the death of an elderly woman who comes to São Paulo to visit her niece in “My Name is Nicky Nicola.” But from genteel Panamerica to rough and tumble Baixo Augusta, what stands out in Bellotto’s volume is the placement of women at the center of many stories. In addition to Boniclaide, there are three other maids: Cléo and Lena, who clean hotel rooms in Vanessa Barbara’s “Cross Contamination,” and Dulcinea, who works for the flaky title character in Mario Prata’s “Teresão.” There are prostitutes, including the crafty Cínthia in Ferréz’s “Flow,” the gentle but nameless girl from Minas Gerais in Marcelo Rubens Paiva’s “The Final Table,” and the feisty, unforgettable heroine of Drauzio Varella’s “Margot.” Women’s stories are often family stories. In editor Bellotto’s “Useless Diary,” a young woman searches for her twin brother, and in “The Force Is With Me,” co-written by veteran author Beatriz Bracher and 17-year-old Maria S. Carvalhosa, a teenager from Rio gets to know her maiden aunt. But women on their own can be dangerous, as Olivia Maia points out in “Coffee Stain.”

In the year of #MeToo, Bellotto’s Akashic entry has a timely feel, giving noir a host of feminine faces.

Pub Date: June 5, 2018

ISBN: 978-1-61775-531-6

Page Count: 280

Publisher: Akashic

Review Posted Online: March 19, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2018

Categories:

MYSTERY & DETECTIVE | INTERNATIONAL CRIME

- BOOK REVIEW
BELLINI AND THE SPHINX
by Tony Bellotto ; translated by Clifford E. Landers

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A CONSPIRACY OF BONES

by Kathy Reichs ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 17, 2020

Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.

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Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.

A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”

Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.

Pub Date: March 17, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Scribner

Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020

Categories:

- BOOK REVIEW
COLD, COLD BONES
by Kathy Reichs

- BOOK REVIEW
THE BONE CODE
by Kathy Reichs

- BOOK REVIEW
TWO NIGHTS
by Kathy Reichs

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THE WINNER

by David Baldacci ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 2, 1997

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Irritatingly trite woman-in-periler from lawyer-turned-novelist Baldacci. Moving away from the White House and the white-shoe Washington law firms of his previous bestsellers (Absolute Power, 1996; Total Control, 1997), Baldacci comes up with LuAnn Tyler, a spunky, impossibly beautiful, white-trash truck stop waitress with a no-good husband and a terminally cute infant daughter in tow. Some months after the birth of Lisa, LuAnn gets a phone call summoning her to a make-shift office in an unrented storefront of the local shopping mall. There, she gets a Faustian offer from a Mr. Jackson, a monomaniacal, cross-dressing manipulator who apparently knows the winning numbers in the national lottery before the numbers are drawn. It seems that LuAnn fits the media profile of what a lottery winner should be—poor, undereducated but proud—and if she's willing to buy the right ticket at the right time and transfer most of her winnings to Jackson, she'll be able to retire in luxury. Jackson fails to inform her, however, that if she refuses his offer, he'll have her killed. Before that can happen, as luck would have it, LuAnn barely escapes death when one of husband Duane's drug deals goes bad. She hops on a first-class Amtrak sleeper to Manhattan with a hired executioner in pursuit. But executioner Charlie, one of Jackson's paid handlers, can't help but hear wedding bells when he sees LuAnn cooing with her daughter. Alas, a winning $100- million lottery drawing complicates things. Jackson spirits LuAnn and Lisa away to Sweden, with Charlie in pursuit. Never fear. Not only will LuAnn escape a series of increasingly violent predicaments, but she'll also outwit Jackson, pay an enormous tax bill to the IRS, and have enough left over to honeymoon in Switzerland. Too preposterous to work as feminine wish-fulfillment, too formulaic to be suspenseful. (Book-of-the-Month Club main selection)