Confronting a Major Vacation Dilemma: What to Read? THE LAST BREATH
Everyone approaches vacation reading differently. Some people like to tackle long, complex books they don’t have time for during the rest of the year; some read about places they’re visiting; others want to sink into a bit of well-written fluff. I do all of those things and have happy memories of reading The Golden Notebook while backpacking around Europe and spending a summer day in a hammock reading Elinor Lipman’s delightful The Ladies’ Man. But about 15 years ago I fell into a tradition that’s stuck, of reading a mystery or two to start off my vacation. A friend recommended Sarah Caudwell, an English barrister and law professor, who wrote erudite stories—including The Shortest Way to Hades and The Sirens Sang of Murder—about an English law professor of indeterminate gender named Hilary Tamar. The plots involve the intricacies of British tax law (which is way more entertaining than it sounds), and for the tone of the first-person narrative, imagine Lemony Snicket for grown-ups:
Belle, Kimberly Harlequin MIRA (400 pp.) $14.95 paper | Sep. 30, 2014 978-0-7783-1722-7 A small Tennessee mountain town is awash in sex and scandal in Belle’s first novel. Gia Andrews, a disaster relief worker, is also a convicted murderer’s daughter. Her father, Ray, was convicted of killing his wife and Gia’s stepmother, Ella Mae, and sentenced to life in prison. But Ray is dying, and prison officials are releasing him on compassionate grounds; Gia’s uncle Cal, a prominent lawyer, has recruited her to return home from Kenya to care for her dad in his home in Rogersville. Despite the fact that she hasn’t seen her father since she left many years ago, she returns, believing her brother, Bo, and sister, Lexi, will help her, but she finds that neither wants anything to do with their father. Her nearest allies turn out to be the home-care worker Uncle Cal has hired, Fannie, and the new man she meets, a bar-and-grill owner named Jake. When Gia meets a law professor planning to write a book about wrongful convictions, he tells her he believes Ray didn’t kill Ella Mae and that Cal, who was Ray’s attorney, didn’t mount much of a defense. After looking into these allegations, Gia discovers her stepmother had an affair with another man and wonders whether her father could be innocent after all. While trying to unravel the mystery of who really killed Ella Mae, things heat up between Gia and Jake, and suddenly the mystery takes a whole new direction. Belle’s a smooth writer whose characters are vibrant and truly reflect the area where the novel is set, but the plot—while clever— takes a back seat to Gia’s and Ella Mae’s separate, but equally steamy, sexual exploits. Thriller fans will find so much space devoted to Gia and Jake’s sexual acrobatics that little time is left for the plot to develop.
Some of my readers, it is true, have been kind enough to say that they would like to know more about me—what I look like, how I dress, how I spend my leisure hours and other details of a personal and sometimes even intimate nature. I do not doubt, however, that these enquiries are made purely as a matter of courtesy and that to take them as au pied de la lettre would be as grave a solecism as to answer a polite “How do you do, Professor Tamar?” with a full account of the state of my digestion. Caudwell only wrote four books before her death in 2000, and after a couple of vacations, I was despondent to have finished them all. I moved on to Donna Leon and her Commissario Guido Brunetti mysteries, which spend as much time on the pleasures of walking through Venice and drinking coffee as on the moral ambiguities of police work in a corrupt city. By the time I started reading her, Leon had built up a large backlist, which kept me happy for quite a few years, but now I’ve read them all and am reduced to waiting all year for a new book, which I no longer have the patience to save for vacation. So I’m looking for a new series to embrace. If you have any suggestions, please send them to me on Twitter, where I’m @lauriemuchnick. —Laurie Muchnick Laurie Muchnick is the fiction editor at Kirkus Reviews. 6
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1 september 2014
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fiction
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kirkus.com
BROKEN MONSTERS
Beukes, Lauren Mulholland Books/Little, Brown (448 pp.) $26.00 | $12.99 e-book | Sep. 16, 2014 978-0-316-21682-1 978-0-316-21683-8 e-book A genuinely unsettling—in all the best ways—blend of suspense and the supernatural makes this a serial-killer tale like you’ve never seen. Set in a crumbling contemporary Detroit, Beukes’ fourth novel (The Shining Girls, 2013, etc.) seamlessly alternates between the points of view of a single mother homicide detective; her 15-year-old daughter; a wannabe journalist; a homeless man; and an artist with deep-seated psychological issues. At the scene of the crime, Detective Gabriella Versado can’t remember the last |