A bullet of a book—and an absolute bull’s eye.
Murder and mayhem are served up alongside metaphysical musings in Rice’s latest (Angel Time, 2009, etc.).
Toby O’Dare is a magnificent mess. PTSD survivor of a hellish childhood (his mother slaughtered his brother), he’s grown up wary, prickly, solitary. This makes him perfectly suited for his vocation/mission—service to the angel Malchiah as a kind of divine vigilante dispensing justice with James Bond cunning. It’s a gig he debuted in Angel Time, the first installment of Songs of the Seraphim, a series that, in company with the author’s prescient vampire chronicles and a catalogue of dozens of other titles, qualifies her as one of America’s most dependably surprising storytellers. Proving herself a brilliant thematic schizophrenic, she here combines her Catholicism, underscored by her previous first-rate fictional takes on the Gospels, and her passion for the dark. A time traveler, O’Dare touches down in Renaissance Italy, assigned by his angelic mentor the task of guarding Vitale, a desperate Jewish physician whose house is possessed by a dybbuk (ghost). Anti-Semitism and fear of demonic possession cause neighbors to feel that Vitale is gradually poisoning a patient, Niccolò. In truth, it’s Niccolò’s brother Lodovico who’s doing the poisoning, by means of death-by-caviar. Hip to the trick, O’Dare ponders motive, and hits upon the lovely Leticia. Turns out she’s Lodovico’s impossible object of desire, impossible because his father, Antonio, had promised the girl to Niccolò. Hence sibling hatred. As the plot turns increasingly operatic, Antonio gets in on the Vitale-bashing, convinced that the physician’s prayers to strange gods are the cause of Niccolò’s dwindling health. O’Dare, the one who unravels this dastardly complexity, rights it, and then proceeds throughout the course of this lean, speedy thriller to rid the world of further horror. The plot’s intense; equally so are Rice’s meditations, while never breaking the seamlessness of the story line, on the nature of love and evil.
A bullet of a book—and an absolute bull’s eye.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4000-4354-5
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2010
These letters from some important executive Down Below, to one of the junior devils here on earth, whose job is to corrupt mortals, are witty and written in a breezy style seldom found in religious literature. The author quotes Luther, who said: "The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn." This the author does most successfully, for by presenting some of our modern and not-so-modern beliefs as emanating from the devil's headquarters, he succeeds in making his reader feel like an ass for ever having believed in such ideas. This kind of presentation gives the author a tremendous advantage over the reader, however, for the more timid reader may feel a sense of guilt after putting down this book. It is a clever book, and for the clever reader, rather than the too-earnest soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1942
ISBN: 0060652934
Page Count: 53
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1943
Deep schmaltz in the Bible Belt.
Christian-fiction writer Martin (The Dead Don’t Dance, not reviewed) chronicles the personal tragedy of a Georgia heart surgeon.
Five years ago in Atlanta, Reese could not save his beloved wife Emma from heart failure, even though the Harvard-trained surgeon became a physician so that he could find a way to fix his childhood sweetheart’s congenitally faulty ticker. He renounced practicing medicine after her death and now lives in quiet anonymity as a boat mechanic on Lake Burton. Across the lake is Emma’s brother Charlie, who was rendered blind on the same desperate night that Reese fought to revive his wife on their kitchen floor. When Reese helps save the life of a seven-year-old local girl named Annie, who turns out to have irreparable heart damage, he is compassionately drawn into her case. He also grows close to Annie’s attractive Aunt Cindy and gradually comes to recognize that the family needs his expertise as a transplant surgeon. Martin displays some impressive knowledge about medical practice and the workings of the heart, but his Christian message is not exactly subtle. “If anything in this universe reflects the fingerprint of God, it is the human heart,” Reese notes of his medical studies. Emma’s letters (kept in a bank vault) quote Bible verse; Charlie elucidates stories of Jesus’ miracles for young Annie; even the napkins at the local bar, The Well, carry passages from the Gospel of John for the benefit of the biker clientele. Moreover, Martin relentlessly hammers home his sentimentality with nature-specific metaphors involving mating cardinals and crying crickets. (Annie sells crickets as well as lemonade to raise money for her heart surgery.) Reese’s habitual muttering of worldly slogans from Milton and Shakespeare (“I am ashes where once I was fire”) doesn’t much cut the cloying piety, and an over-the-top surgical save leaves the reader feeling positively bruised.
Deep schmaltz in the Bible Belt.Pub Date: April 4, 2006
ISBN: 1-5955-4054-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: WestBow/Thomas Nelson
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2006
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