A sequel that whets your appetite for another taste of life in West Mills.
A triple murder shocks a small North Carolina town into confronting its deepest fears and darker secrets lingering in the wake of the civil rights era.
Winslow follows up his widely praised debut, In West Mills (2019), by returning to the eponymous Southern locale of that multilayered romance with a murder mystery set in the mid-1970s. The story begins shortly after the bullet-riddled bodies of Dr. Marian Harmon, her sister, Marva, and brother, Lazarus, are discovered at the foot of the staircase of their home in the predominantly Black western section of West Mills. As readers of the earlier novel will recall, the hamlet is divided along racial lines by a small canal, and even after Jim Crow’s demise, the scars of racial segregation remain deep and raw. The town’s sheriff’s department regards their first homicide in decades as little more than a drug-related break-in, even after they interrogate, then release, the siblings’ half brother, Olympus “Lymp” Seymore, who was first suspected because of an argument he’d had with the three Harmons. Arrested or not, Lymp nonetheless walks around town with a taint of suspicion. And this deeply distresses Josephine Wright, a middle-aged native daughter of West Mills who has returned home after a 48-year stint in New York City to make a new life for herself with her childhood friend Lymp. Jo decides to remove any doubts about Lymp’s innocence by wandering around town asking who else might have a motive for murder. Is it Eunice Loving, who had taken her son La’Roy to Dr. Harmon to “have the gay removed” but was later horrified by the doctor’s violent methods? Is it Ted Temple, the town’s most prominent White real estate mogul, who was landlord for the Harmons’ home and, until a bitter dispute separated them, Marian’s secret lover? Or could it have been Ted’s daughter, Savannah, who more than a decade before had been ostracized by her father and exiled from the predominantly White part of town because she’d fallen in love with a Black man? Or could it have been Lymp after all? Jo isn’t sure of anything, but she proves a relentless and incisive sleuth, not just in pursuit of what happened, but in untangling the complex social dynamics within the seemingly bucolic rural Carolina hamlet. Though not as intricately woven as Winslow’s first novel, this tale comes across as considerably more than a regional whodunit because of its author’s humane and sensitive perceptions toward his characters, even those who may not deserve such equanimity.
A sequel that whets your appetite for another taste of life in West Mills.Pub Date: Jan. 17, 2023
ISBN: 978-1-63557-532-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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