Two expatriates (he's German, she's American) make a life together in contemporary Paris; characteristically, Just makes us pay attention to the political/cultural context of his domestic story and then, almost as an afterthought, spices it with East/West melodrama. In a small town near Hamburg, in 1945, ten-year-old Sydney van Damm watches a Wehrmacht unit, unaware that the war is over, ambush and kill some friendly Americans; tied by blood to the Germans, but idolizing Americans in his fantasies, Sydney is heartbroken. His father, Major Klaus, has died mysteriously in a Berlin prison; his mother, Inge (``a figure from German folklore''), is keeping them alive on scraps. Inge represents continuity, the desire for a life of ``strict exactitude'' in a ``rightful place''; recurring phrases, these—they form the clearest expression of the German soul. She disapproves bitterly when Sydney emigrates to Paris in 1956; eventually she will return to her roots in the East. Sydney becomes the translator for the German-American Foundation, a CIA front; his boss is the American Junko Poole, a flamboyant opportunist. Through Junko he meets classy, independently wealthy Angela Dilion, who fled America after her brother was killed in Vietnam. They fall in love and marry (by now it's 1975); their son Max is born damaged, autistic. Sydney, the Foundation behind him, has become the best in his field, translating Germany's most respected novelist, a labor of love, though tinged with regret that his ``life has disappeared inside the product.'' Forward to 1989, Europe's tumultuous Year of Change; where the Germans see freedom, Junko sees big bucks. He involves the reluctant Sydney in a shady arms-deal, and the hapless translator reaps the whirlwind. There are some disturbing gaps in this novel-without-a-center; what happened, for example, to the long years when the van Damms coped with autistic Max at home, presumably the greatest challenge to their marriage? Just is one of fiction's free spirits, impatient with plotting, but meticulous with detail work. Fortunately, his spacious work charms and enriches more than it puzzles and confounds.
Pub Date: Sept. 9, 1991
ISBN: 0-395-57168-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1991
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
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
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
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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