A thousand dollars is a lot of 1936 dollars, and even though Raymond Chandler's never walked the mean streets he writes about, he's happy to take the money from self-styled ``Countess'' Carmilla Blastok (nÇe Letty Knibbs of Newark) to find her missing sister Elina—especially since he'd like to quiz Elina about the death of her rumored lover, pianist/composer Julian Pascal. The LAPD thinks Julian's death in a Chinese cemetery was a clear case of ritual suicide, but Julian's ex-wife, Cissy, who left him for Chandler years ago, is sure it was murder. With some help from Dashiell Hammett and Erle Stanley Gardner, his buddies from Black Mask (The Black Mask Murders, 1994), Chandler goes after Elina's lowlife companion Merv Enright—and walks right into a mulligan stew of fact and fiction, with many scenes he's evidently planning to hoard for his own later novels. Despite clunky cameos by Orson Welles, Hedda Hopper, Charlie Chaplin, William Randolph Hearst, and Shirley Temple, the shaggy story moves along briskly, with detection-on-the-fly very typical of Chandler's own work, and inaccurate social prophecies (``Maybe Los Angeles will someday even lead the way in race relations,'' muses one character) that mark a nice change from the usual 20/20 hindsight of most historical mysteries. It's not just because of his subject that prolific Nolan may well represent the last of the pulp tradition. Black Mask fans will be waiting eagerly for his Erle Stanley Gardner installment.
Pub Date: Jan. 22, 1996
ISBN: 0-312-14011-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1995
Leisurely, conscientiously plotted, smoothly written, and more surprising in its details than its larger arc.
A fatal accident that tangles the fates of three ill-assorted people when two cars crash into each other outside a Gloucester village raises urgent questions about the living.
Hours after being ejected from the Lamb, Viv Holland’s pub in Lower Slaughter, her former boss Fergus O’Reilly, who’s turned up without warning and pressed her to take a new job 12 years after she quit his Michelin-rated Chelsea restaurant, is found dead after a collision outside the village. Nor is he the only victim: Nell Greene, the Lamb patron who’d picked up Fergus when she saw him walking uncertainly along the road to drive him to the hospital, has also died at the scene. And there’s evidence that Fergus was fatally poisoned even before the crash. The Met’s Detective Superintendent Duncan Kincaid and his wife, DI Gemma James, are on hand to investigate because they’ve accepted an invitation to stay at Beck House, the home of DS Melody Talbot’s wealthy parents, Sir Ivan and Lady Adelaide Talbot, for whom Viv has agreed to cater an elaborate charity luncheon. But Kincaid, who was driving the car Nell struck and survived the collision only to see Nell die as he looked on helplessly, isn’t himself either physically or mentally, and the solution seems a long way off. There’ll be another murder, a series of increasingly revealing flashbacks to Viv’s stint at O’Reilly’s 12 years ago, and endless updates on the sexual histories of the suspects with the victims, each other, and the police. Through it all, Kincaid and Gemma (Garden of Lamentations, 2017, etc.) keep stiff upper lips even when the dark revelations reach into Beck House.
Leisurely, conscientiously plotted, smoothly written, and more surprising in its details than its larger arc.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-227166-2
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Tepid terrors along the way to a mildly surprising end.
Suburban thriller from the prolific Coben (No Second Chance, 2002, etc.), about a perfect husband who disappears when a photo from the past shows up in the latest batch from the photomat.
Perfectly in love since their romantic meeting in France 15 years earlier, Jack and Grace Lawson are living the suburban dream: Windstar, Saab, daughter, son. He makes lots of money, she makes lots of art. There is a teeny flaw. Grace limps. It’s the scar she bears from the trauma she endured before the trip to France. There was this rock concert. Shots were fired. Panic. Deaths. Heroism. Cowardice. Badly mangled Grace made it out of a coma with a week or two of memory gone and a healthy dislike of big crowds. Suddenly the superperfect life she has built from the ruins has gone off the rails. Tucked in among a set of newly developed photos is a snap taken sometime in the ’80s. It shows a group of young people, possibly hip for the decade, and one of the lads, while hairier and callower, is clearly Jack. The insertion could only have been at the hands of the slacker in the Kodak kiosk, but he’s disappeared. And, upon viewing the photo, so has Jack, leaving Grace to ask that old reliable story-starting question: “Just who is this man I thought I knew?” Answers must be found quickly, for handsome Jack has been captured by a cold-blooded, sadistic, Korean killer and lies senseless in the boot of the stolen family minivan. Detective assistance comes from a rogue District Attorney, a wacky girlfriend, a lovelorn neighbor, a tough Jewish cop with a hole in his heart where his wife used to be, a shadowy, powerful mob guy whose son died at the rock concert, and possibly from Jimmy X, the rocker whose concert seems to have started the present subdivisional mayhem all those years ago.
Tepid terrors along the way to a mildly surprising end.Pub Date: May 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-525-94791-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2004
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