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
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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
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