A complex, unnerving study of relationships, with none more stressful than that of Sgt. Zailer and DC Waterhouse. Her...
Why confess to a murder that never happened?
Picture framer Aidan Seed tells his assistant Ruth Bussey, his new lover, that he murdered Mary Trelease years ago. No questions, please. Ruth not only disbelieves him but has proof that this never happened. Just a few months ago, while working for another picture framer, she fell in love with a signed and recently dated work by Mary and wanted to buy it. As a result, the artist attacked her and caused her to leave her job. Still, the confession so worries Ruth that she approaches the Culver Valley police and speaks with Detective Charlotte Zailer, recently demoted for a past entanglement with a serial rapist. Zailer and her current fiancé, socially maladroit copper Simon Waterhouse, unofficially tackle the case of the murder that wasn’t. Among their findings: Seed is the prime suspect in the murder of another woman, alternative therapist Gemma Crowther, whose past includes an interlude of torture that left Ruth with a jagged scar bisecting her abdomen, a permanent sense of paranoia and an admiration bordering on obsession for people, like Zailer, who’ve survived extreme vilification. There’s also the peculiar provenance of Abberton, one of Mary’s paintings that seems to turn up in unlikely places, including an arts festival and a girl’s school attended long ago by a certain Martha Wyers.
A complex, unnerving study of relationships, with none more stressful than that of Sgt. Zailer and DC Waterhouse. Her exemplary skills put Hannah (The Wrong Mother, 2009, etc.) right up there with Ruth Rendell.Pub Date: June 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-14-311749-0
Page Count: 470
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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