An overstuffed but breezy family drama that plays out its familiar narrative beats right on time.
A British journalist and a Canadian carpenter discover the murky union between their parents during the quest to solve an old mystery.
Here’s a cultural stew for you: a novel by bestselling French novelist Levy (Hope, 2016, etc.) with a translation by Wasserman, a former film professional, starring two charming leads saddled with Beatles-esque names, set largely in the cinematically dreary city of Baltimore, Maryland. That’s the scene for Levy’s sprawling familial saga that spans three generations and time periods and leaps between points of view with abandon. Eleanor-Rigby “Elby” Donovan is a journalist for National Geographic, still mourning the loss of her mother, who recently passed away, and tending to her idiosyncratic father and a pair of odd-duck siblings. Her proclamation early in the book is prescient: “The strange part is that it took traveling to the ends of the earth for me to realize that what I was looking for was right there in front of me the whole time. All I had to do was open my eyes and start noticing the wonder of the world outside my front door.” Her adventure begins when she receives an anonymous letter hinting of secrets in her mother’s past and pointing her toward clues to her mum’s true nature. Simultaneously, in Quebec, handsome young carpenter George-Harrison Collins receives a similar letter hinting at the truth about the father he never knew. Between his characters' present-day meet-cute introduction and their discovery of an eccentric professor who holds the answers to their familial drama, Levy inserts a wartime story set in 1944 about a wealthy Maryland family and another sequence set in 1980 that explores the mysterious circumstances binding Elby's and George-Harrison’s families together. By modern standards, it sets a rather frothy, picaresque tone for a mystery novel, but readers looking for something light will find it an amusing indulgence.
An overstuffed but breezy family drama that plays out its familiar narrative beats right on time.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5039-5912-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Amazon Crossing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2018
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
Eskens’ debut is a solid and thoughtful tale of a young man used to taking on burdens beyond his years—none more dangerous...
A struggling student’s English assignment turns into a mission to solve a 30-year-old murder.
Joe Talbert has had very few breaks in his 21 years. The son of a single and very alcoholic mother, he’s worked hard to save enough money to leave his home in Austin, Minnesota, for the University of Minnesota. Although he has to leave his autistic younger brother, Jeremy Naylor, to the dubious care of their mother, Joe is determined to beat the odds and get his degree. For an assignment in his English class, he decides to interview Carl Iverson, a man convicted of raping and killing a 14-year-old girl. Carl, who maintains his innocence, is dying of cancer and has been released to a nursing home to end his life in lonely but unrepentant pain. The more Joe learns about Carl—a Vietnam vet with two Purple Hearts and a Silver Cross—the more the young man questions the conviction. Joe’s plan to write a short biography and earn an easy A turns into something more. Even after his mother is arrested for drunk driving and guilt-trips Joe into ransacking his college fund to bail her out, he soldiers on with the project, though her irresponsibility forces him to take Jeremy into his care. But it’s his younger brother who cracks the code of the long-dead murder victim’s secret diary and an attractive neighbor, Lila Nash, who has her own agenda for helping Joe solve the mystery, whatever the risk.
Eskens’ debut is a solid and thoughtful tale of a young man used to taking on burdens beyond his years—none more dangerous than championing a bitter old man convicted of a horrific crime.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61614-998-7
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Seventh Street Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 8, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2014
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