At once a mind-bending puzzle and a profound meditation on love, fate, ambition, and regret.
A middle-aged marketing executive questions whether she’s seeing doppelgängers or suffering delusions.
Abigail Willard, 46, is heading home to Brooklyn after a long day at her job as art director at a pharmaceutical company when she spies her 22-year-old double at a pay phone near the Holland Tunnel. She leaps out of her taxi to get a better look only for the girl to hail the cab and disappear. Abby doesn’t mention the incident to her husband, Dennis, or her sons, Pete and Benjamin; it was dark and rainy and she was probably just tired. Then, several days later, she happens upon her younger self reading on a bench outside a library she used to frequent—and the encounters only escalate from there. Is Abby hallucinating? Is the figure a friendly ghost of sorts, meant to remind the former painter of the dreams she abandoned? Or is this a chance for Abby to prevent whatever tragedy caused her to forget a year of her 20s? Meanwhile, Dennis fears he’ll be fired, and 16-year-old Pete becomes involved with an increasingly violent group of antifa activists, earning him—and Abigail—the attention of a handsome police detective. Although an unidentified individual’s quest to solve “the many mysteries about Ms. Willard’s role in the deadly events of 2015” forms the book’s frame, Immergut allows the bulk of the tale to unfold via Abby’s journal. Her entries are evocatively written, keenly self-aware, and peppered with artful observations that lend the story texture, vibrancy, and depth.
At once a mind-bending puzzle and a profound meditation on love, fate, ambition, and regret.Pub Date: July 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-274758-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A great premise leads through all the twists you’d expect to a thoroughly muddy final movement.
Sports agent Myron Bolitar meets the Setup Serial Killer, who’s found a highly effective way to keep anyone from connecting the dots.
There’s no arguing with DNA evidence, the ultimate forensic clincher. So when basketball player Greg Downing’s DNA is found on the scene where retired model Cecelia Callister and her son, Clay, were killed, the FBI comes calling on Myron to ask where they can find Greg. Myron’s a reasonable person to ask because Greg was his schoolmate and former client, the man who wooed and won Myron’s girlfriend away from him and made her Emily Downing. Try as he might, though, Myron can’t help much beyond repeating the obvious: Greg died three years ago, and his body was cremated. Since the Feds aren’t about to give up their search, Myron and his partner, financial advisor Win Lockwood, decide they’d better see if they can get ahead of this story by confirming or contradicting the story of Greg’s death. Meantime, a series of interleaved episodes show the killer eliminating a series of primary targets and framing secondary targets so convincingly for the murders, with special thanks to planted DNA, that it never occurs to the police to connect crimes that were so readily solved on their own. Complications arise when Myron’s thrown together with Jeremy Downing, the son he fathered in a pre-wedding tryst with Emily and then passed off as Greg’s, and when the allies of mob boss Joseph “Joey the Toe” Turant, who was locked up four years ago after his DNA-fueled conviction for the murder of Jordan Kravat, decide to lean on Myron to get him to reveal where Greg is.
A great premise leads through all the twists you’d expect to a thoroughly muddy final movement.Pub Date: May 14, 2024
ISBN: 9781538756317
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2024
A moving portrait of rueful middle age and the failure to connect.
An acclaimed novelist revisits the central characters of his best-known work.
At the end of Brooklyn (2009), Eilis Lacey departed Ireland for the second and final time—headed back to New York and the Italian American husband she had secretly married after first traveling there for work. In her hometown of Enniscorthy, she left behind Jim Farrell, a young man she’d fallen in love with during her visit, and the inevitable gossip about her conduct. Tóibín’s 11th novel introduces readers to Eilis 20 years later, in 1976, still married to Tony Fiorello and living in the titular suburbia with their two teenage children. But Eilis’ seemingly placid existence is disturbed when a stranger confronts her, accusing Tony of having an affair with his wife—now pregnant—and threatening to leave the baby on their doorstep. “She’d known men like this in Ireland,” Tóibín writes. “Should one of them discover that their wife had been unfaithful and was pregnant as a result, they would not have the baby in the house.” This shock sends Eilis back to Enniscorthy for a visit—or perhaps a longer stay. (Eilis’ motives are as inscrutable as ever, even to herself.) She finds the never-married Jim managing his late father’s pub; unbeknownst to Eilis (and the town), he’s become involved with her widowed friend Nancy, who struggles to maintain the family chip shop. Eilis herself appears different to her old friends: “Something had happened to her in America,” Nancy concludes. Although the novel begins with a soap-operatic confrontation—and ends with a dramatic denouement, as Eilis’ fate is determined in a plot twist worthy of Edith Wharton—the author is a master of quiet, restrained prose, calmly observing the mores and mindsets of provincial Ireland, not much changed from the 1950s.
A moving portrait of rueful middle age and the failure to connect.Pub Date: May 7, 2024
ISBN: 9781476785110
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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