An engaging detective gets support from neither other characters nor the plot in this laborious outing.
In Dunning’s debut novel, a woman’s suspicious death in a Kentish country home brings together an assemblage of London and local police with the residents of the subdivided house.
Detective Superintendent Charles Blower, a venerable member of London’s Metropolitan Police, becomes involved in an investigation at Benfield House when a woman is discovered dead in one of the flats. He is induced to investigate the supposedly accidental death by his good friend Alex Pike, a friend of the flat’s absent owner. The caretaker’s far-fetched explanation for the woman’s death—that it was an inadvertent piercing while she sat under a window that spontaneously shattered—makes Blower and Pike wary of the caretaker, an annoying Cockney named Albert Drew. Superintendent Blower and company must first determine the woman’s identity and then the reason for her ill-fated visit. Next, he must find out which of the many colorful denizens of Benfield House, her family or her associates might have had a motive to kill her. Although murder is extremely unusual in the quaint Kentish town, burglaries have become commonplace, and Benfield House is the site of one amid Blower’s investigation. Eventually, all the culprits are apprehended and arrested, but not before hundreds of cups of tea have been prepared and served, along with endless customary English meals. Very little action fills the spaces between the “cuppas” and comestibles, though much is left to tin-eared dialogue, including the transliterated Cockney of Mr. Drew: “[Y]eah, ’es the bloke what’s ’avin’ it off wiv ’er in number four ain’ ’e.” Adding to the difficulty deciphering the dialect is the author’s sporadic use of simple punctuation, commas especially. This leads to many confusing sentences: “Conspiracy to murder Thomas?” or “We’ll shout darling if anything really startling comes up.” The sophistication of the crime fighters strains credulity when the issue of acquiring mobile phones for members of the force is brought up at least 10 times; a training session is held to familiarize officers with “this amazing device, which, I’m prepared to bet, will revolutionize communications and crime solving in the next ten years or so.”
An engaging detective gets support from neither other characters nor the plot in this laborious outing.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2013
ISBN: 978-1491883280
Page Count: 254
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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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