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Summary
Summary
The indomitable Cece Caruso is back in Susan Kandel's Dial H For Hitchcock. The vintage clothes enthusiast, biographer of masters of mystery, and amateur sleuth who has flourished her skills in Christietown and I Dreamed I Married Perry Mason now tackles a murderous puzzle full of twists, turns, and mistaken identities worthy of maestro Hitchcock himself. Readers will be Spellbound by this latest investigation by sometime-detective Cece, whom reviewers have called, "Delightful" (Boston Globe) and "A hoot" (Denver Rocky Mountain News). True mystery fans would have to be Psycho to miss Dial H For Hitchcock.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Alfred Hitchcock fans should love Kandel's fifth Cece Caruso mystery (after 2007's Christietown), a terrific tribute that's also wickedly funny. L.A. vintage fashionista Cece, who's just returned from her solo honeymoon after dumping LAPD Det. Peter Gambino, is researching a Hitchcock biography when her life takes a Hitchcockian turn. After watching a screening of Vertigo, she returns home to find someone else's cellphone in her purse. A curious call on the cellphone leads Cece to Beechwood Canyon, where she hopes to return it to its owner, Anita Colby. Instead, Cece winds up witnessing the cool blonde's murder. As Cece gets drawn deeper into a plot with alarming similarities to the celebrated director's noir masterpieces, she fears she's become a victim of identity theft as well as a dead ringer for the Kim Novak character in Vertigo. Kandel keeps the action tight all the way to a delightful denouement that Hitch no doubt would've appreciated. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
When she's framed for murder, it's up to Californian writer and vintage fashionista Cece Caruso (Christietown, 2007, etc.) to clear her name. Cece is nursing a failed engagement by immersing herself in the films of Alfred Hitchcock. At a showing of Vertigo, she winds up with someone else's cell phone in her 1950s Lucite purse and attempts to return it by going to a cliffside rendezvous set up by a mysterious telephone caller. Instead of making a simple handoff, Cece witnesses a blond woman shoved to her death. When Cece grabs the phone to call 911, she gets an incoming calla stranger telling her to say she saw a mere accident and, worse, a recording of what sounds like her own voice threatening the dead woman. Though she has many cops in her large, loving family, Cece decides not to tell the police but instead lies to them and investigates herself. Finding ID belonging to Anita Colby at the scene, she breaks into her apartment to reconnoiter. Despite the threats and the police's suspicions, Cece continues her blithe flirtation with the new guy next door and her trips to the park with her grandkids. But Anita's acquaintances claim she knew Cece, and so does the evidence. When Cece can no longer trust her own memories, she hits the road. Who's claiming to be Cece, and why did they kill Anita? Flat characters, an implausible premise and a simply preposterous conclusion. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Just back from a solo honeymoon, after canceling her wedding, Cece Caruso becomes embroiled in a devious plot that implicates her in a murder. Fortyish grandmother Cece, a Jersey girl relocated to L.A. who writes biographies of dead mystery authors, is researching Alfred Hitchcock when she finds a cell phone identical to hers in her purse. Her attempt to find the phone's owner leads her to witness a man pushing a woman off a cliff, after which a call warns Cece to report the incident as an accident; then she finds a call recorded on the mysterious cell in which she herself threatens to kill the victim. Running just ahead of police to try to stay out of custody, she untangles the web with last-minute help from her former fiancé, LAPD detective Peter Gambino. The fifth in the Cece Caruso series is another breezy, entertaining entry. Brisk prose, a pistol of a protagonist, and nice riffs on Hitch both biographical and psychological more than compensate for an overly contrived plot.--Leber, Michele Copyright 2009 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
"Maybe if he had one more drink they'd leave him alone." That's the chilling opening sentence of THE GHOSTS OF BELFAST (Soho, $25), a first novel by Stuart Neville so bleak and despairing - "noir" in the genuine existential sense - it would rattle the composure of a saint. Gerry Fegan, the solitary drinker tossing back shots of whiskey and peering into the shadows for ghosts, is a hard man, an I.R.A. enforcer during the Troubles and still a legend in West Belfast. But unlike former colleagues who cynically retooled their skills for successful careers as politicians and crime bosses, Fegan is haunted by the people he killed - "12 of them if he counted the baby in its mother's arms." The ghosts who stare back at him with accusing eyes may be only manifestations of his own guilt, but they won't let him alone until he takes vengeance by executing the men whose orders led to these deaths. Once Fegan accepts his deadly commission and the assassinations begin, it's not hard to read this disturbing novel as a blood-soaked thriller. (Neville not only draws out every gory detail of Fegan's murders, he also takes relish in reconstructing the original atrocities that motivated them.) But that would do a disservice to Neville's higher aim of protesting the reclamation and legitimization of unrepentant terrorists. Foot soldiers like Fegan are problem enough in modern-day Northern Ireland. "If there's peace, if it's really over, then what use are we?" one of these thugs wants to know. Of more concern, though, are the powerful men who orchestrated decades of brutal civil conflict and survived to make dishonest fortunes in peacetime. These are the men on Fegan's hit list, and they don't go down easily. For something that reads as if it were written in a hellish fury, Neville's novel is a coldly lucid assessment of the fragility of the Irish peace. Gerry Fegan may not be the brightest of bulbs, but he has the clarity of vision to see that men who operate entirely for their own gain and with total indifference to human life aren't the best people to run a country. There's neither rest nor redemption for this anguished antihero, who knows that despite all the ghosts he has avenged, there will be more waiting in the shadows. If Neville's nihilistic vision qualifies his novel as a rare example of legitimate noir fiction, what are we to make of all the "noir" story collections gushing from Akashic Books? In his introduction to BOSTON NOIR (Akashic, paper, $15.95), Dennis Lehane advises us not to judge the genre by its Hollywood images of sharp men in fedoras lighting cigarettes for femmes fatales standing in dark alleys. Offering his own definition of noir as "working-class tragedy," he writes persuasively of the gentrification that has eroded "the tribalism of the city" and left people feeling "crushed, attenuated, castrated" by "the Machine." But that's really a definition of good regional crime writing rather than the noir sensibility, which has more to do with a loss of faith, hope and outer direction so profound that the alienated antihero is moved to renounce all society and live entirely by his own moral code. Patrick Millikin, the editor of PHOENIX NOIR (Akashic, paper, $15.95), doesn't even attempt a definition, going straight to the regional aspects of his choices. But as if to prove his witty claim that "sunshine is the new noir," he offers one superb specimen, "Whiteout on Van Buren," in which Don Winslow makes skillful use of a city street at high noon to provide the perfect metaphor for life and death in an indifferent universe. So, are we agreed that chick lit mysteries have pretty much run their course, elbowed out by sexier trends involving vampire detectives and blasphemous reincarnations of Jane Austen? That thinning out of the lightweight mystery field makes more room for real charmers like Susan Kandel's clever series featuring Cece Caruso, an amateur sleuth who lives in West Hollywood and writes biographies of dead mystery authors to support her passion for vintage clothes. Cece is researching a new book on the master of film suspense in DIAL H FOR HITCHCOCK (Harper, paper, $13.99) when her life suddenly takes on the dimensions of a Hitchcock movie - of several Hitchcock movies, actually. After witnessing a murder in the ambiguous manner of Jimmy Stewart in "Rear Window," she checks into a creepy motel ("I needed a shower") and makes her way to other familiar film locales while suffering a loss of identity akin to Kim Novak's in "Vertigo." Despite the hectic pace of the movie-driven scenes, no vintage outfits are harmed in this caper. With THE LONG DIVISION (Minotaur, $24.99), Derek Nikitas bumps up the style requirements for writing crime fiction another notch. When Jodie Larkin steals $5,000 from a home she cleans for an Atlanta housekeeping service and takes off in a stolen car to reconcile with the son she abandoned 15 years earlier, she sets in motion a chain of events that will eventually unite a group of strangers in grief. That takes some dazzling plot maneuvers, but Nikitas interlocks his fragmented story pieces in a way that makes everything seem inevitable - even the murders. At one point, we're following three different cars on three different roads, each a vehicular stage where frantic parents and their miserable children can act out their sad fantasies. As one disaffected daughter puts it to her dangerous new friend, "We can just get on the highway and keep driving south, somewhere warm where we don't have to think." In Stuart Neville's first novel, a guilt-ridden I.R.A. enforcer takes vengeance on his former bosses.