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THE KINDEST USE A KNIFE

Razor-sharp and raw: a standout thriller from across the Atlantic.

Psychologically probing examination of a tragic friendship between two troubled and highly competitive musicians.

Lee and James met more than ten years ago in London at the Cabresi Academy of Music. Lee was a phenomenally gifted young cellist from a poor family who had been given a scholarship and lodged with the headmaster. James was a rich wastrel who played the violin passably at best but was admitted on the strength of his father’s large donation to the school. Lee’s psychiatrist Peter narrates the story in flashback, so it’s not giving anything away to say that Lee ends up dead from a suspicious drug overdose and James stands trial for his murder. How did things ever come to such a pass? Jealousy is the quickest explanation, but it’s a sword that cuts both ways. Yes, James was jealous of Lee’s talent, but outsider Lee was jealous of James’s money and social status. They soon began to feed off each other in a truly perverse pas de deux, with James supplying money, drugs, and girls to Lee in order to secure his status as the best friend of a genius. After Lee was injured in a jealous brawl with one of his girlfriends that left him unable to play the cello, however, James stood by him when everyone else turned away, finding him work and a place to live. That may well have been the fatal misstep, since James’s girlfriend Gina also inhabited the apartment. Soon she was carrying on an affair with Lee as well, and it was only a matter of time before the situation blew up. Readers are warned not to connect the dots too hastily: second-novelist Jones (Twelve, 2001, not reviewed) has some last-minute twists kneaded into the plot.

Razor-sharp and raw: a standout thriller from across the Atlantic.

Pub Date: Jan. 15, 2004

ISBN: 0-00-655239-0

Page Count: 192

Publisher: Flamingo/Trafalgar

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2003

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THE SECRET HISTORY

The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.

Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992

ISBN: 1400031702

Page Count: 592

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992

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CIRCE

Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.

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A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.

“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.

Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.

Pub Date: April 10, 2018

ISBN: 978-0-316-55634-7

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Little, Brown

Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018

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