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Summary
Summary
"Cornelia Read's darkest, most passionate, and most poignant book yet." --Tana French, New York Times Bestselling Author
The smart-mouthed but sensitive runaway socialite Madeline Dare is shocked when she discovers the skeleton of a brutalized three-year-old boy in her own weed-ridden family cemetery outside Manhattan. Determined to see that justice is served, she finds herself examining her own troubled personal history, and the sometimes hidden, sometimes all-too-public class and racial warfare that penetrates every level of society in the savage streets of New York City during the early 1990s.
Madeline is aided in her efforts by a colorful assemblage of friends, relatives, and new acquaintances, each one representing a separate strand of the patchwork mosaic city politicians like to brag about. The result is an unforgettable narrative that relates the causes and consequences of a vicious crime to the wider relationships that connect and divide us all.
Author Notes
Cornelia Read grew up in New York, California, and Hawaii. She is a reformed debutante who currently lives in New York City. To learn more about the author, you can visit her website at www.corneliaread.com.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Set in 1990, Read's superb third Madeline Dare novel (after The Crazy School) finds the acid-tongued ex-socialite and her blue-collar husband, Dean, in Manhattan. A chance encounter with distant cousin Cate Ludlam introduces Madeline to Queens' Prospect Cemetery, where Cate is in charge of the volunteer cleanup effort. While helping to clear weeds, Madeline unearths a small skeleton, which turns out to be that of three-year-old Teddy Underhill, reported missing months earlier. Accustomed to snooping around police investigations, Madeline hounds the lead detective in charge for answers, and soon learns that Teddy was a victim of regular physical abuse at the hands of his mother and her boyfriend. Read expertly evokes the New York City of the period, from the nearly palpable grime of Chelsea to disturbing undertones of racism and classism in the justice system. Equal parts toughness and vulnerability, Madeline is always a bracing heroine. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
Ex-debutante Madeline Dare is a fallen WASP with a stinging wit. The one-time newspaper reporter seems to find murder and mayhem wherever she goes. In this lively third offering (after The Crazy School, 2008), the mordant Dare discovers, in a New York cemetery housing her ancestors, the remains of what was clearly an abused boy. What cruel soul could have beaten three-year-old Teddy Underhill to death? High on the suspect list are the boy's deadbeat mother, Angela, and her equally unsavory boyfriend, Albert, who claims the child wandered off while he was taking a nap. Madeline finds herself immersed in the case, while her husband, Dean, spends his days working for Christoph, a neo-Nazi businessman. (Christoph's wife, Astrid, gives Madeline a copy of Mein Kampf as a gift.) Along the way, Madeline gets chummy with a homicide cop named Skwarecki, who shares her endearingly cynical outlook on life. As in previous entries, Shamus Award-winner Read offers a steady dose of suspense and plenty of clever commentary on the caprices of the upper crust.--Block, Allison Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
How do domestic abuse and chronic alcoholism drive entire neighborhoods to ruin? How can drug trafficking and ethnic violence transform a vast public housing complex into a war zone? These are the sorts of questions raised by the gutsy Scottish writer Denise Mina in two series of sociologically freighted novels set in Glasgow. Each comes with its own locally born and bred (and nearly broken) female protagonist, one a social worker and the other a reporter, who approach crime by going to the root of it and asking how a civilized society can allow such injustice to flourish. STILL MIDNIGHT (Reagan Arthur/ Little, Brown, $24.99) opens a third series in the same vein, challenging us to reflect on how a violent act can unravel even the most close-knit family. Terror grips the household of a shopkeeper named Aamir Anwar when two masked gunmen burst into the family's modest home clamoring for "Bob," a name that means nothing to anyone. In their frustration, the bumbling pair make off with the patriarch after accidentally shooting his daughter, leaving the others wondering how to come up with a £2 million ransom. Alex Morrow, a detective sergeant with the Strathclyde police force, is another of Mina's prickly heroines, the kind you love at your own risk. Burdened with personal tragedy and embattled by class and gender politics, Morrow is abrasive, ill-mannered and tough to like. She's also the smartest cop in the shop, the only one sensitive enough to interpret the subtle vagaries of human behavior. It's a huge pleasure to watch her crack the "family myths and fables" that blood relatives instinctively adopt as protection from outsiders - and as a way of preserving themselves from members of their own clan. Mina makes a great deal of the racial prejudices that poison community police work, but her grimly funny plot really turns on the eccentricities of her unpredictable characters. If you don't count his newborn grandchild, Aamir is the only true innocent here, a tidy little man whose mania for cleanliness and order is his way of keeping chaos at bay. The amateur villains of this tragicomic piece are drawn with the same wry compassion and bleak humor, even the clumsy idiot who is so startled by the beauty of Aamir's teenage daughter that he shoots her. However this family pulls together after these bizarre misadventures, the safe and orderly world Aamir built to protect it will never be the same. The voice of the narrator - low, intense and soaked in melancholy - is what hooks us in KNOWN TO EVIL (Riverhead, $25.95), the second mystery by Walter Mosley to feature Leonid McGill, an exboxer and onetime fixer for the mob. "I gave up my dirty tricks with the intention of doing the right thing in my business and my life," McGill tells us in a world-weary tone that's music to our ears. "But that never changed my brawling style." This reformed bad boy currently works out of an Art Deco Manhattan office building as a private eye, but it's hard to make amends to society when most of your clients and contacts have underworld connections. Harder still when the wife you don't love, the lover who left you, and two criminally inclined children are creating constant distractions. McGill's shady past comes back to bite him when he does a favor for a power broker he refers to as "the Big Man" by keeping an eye on a young woman of blameless reputation. When the P.I. arrives on her doorstep, the place is crawling with cops, and before he knows it, McGill is mixed up in a murder. Mosley uses his plot like clothesline, stringing up scenes that barely touch but look great flapping in the wind. His characters are something else, though. Like McGill, they live and breathe genre lingo, even when they're just talking with their fists. Philip Kerr transports us to Nazi Germany in 1934 in IF THE DEAD RISE NOT (Marian Wood/Putnam, $26.95), a solid addition to the great crime novels that make up the Berlin Noir trilogy and, like them, strategically positioned on the margins of World War II. Bernie Gunther, the maverick homicide cop who bolted the force during the political purges of 1933, is installed as a house detective at a fashionable hotel, dealing with petty thefts and keeping an eye out for "joy girls." Yet this dull job turns deadly when Bernie is caught up in the German Olympic Organizing Committee's machinations to forestall an American boycott of the 1936 Olympiad by covering up its systematic exclusion of Jews from German sports clubs. Leaving the intrigue to the flashy guys in espionage novels, Bernie arms himself with a strong right hook and a tough-guy line of patter to make it out of this one alive. That well-bred voice cursing a blue streak in INVISIBLE BOY (Grand Central, $24.99) can belong only to Madeline Dare, the renegade socialite from Oyster Bay, Long Island, who solves murders and spits venom in Cornelia Read's offbeat mysteries, it's the early 1990s and Madeline is living in Chelsea and working part time taking phone orders for a publisher when her cousin Cate talks her into helping to restore an abandoned family cemetery in Queens. Madeline is so distressed when she discovers a child's skeleton in the underbrush that she attaches herself to the police investigation. Although Read gives her heroine a strong personal motive for delving into this sad case, the soulsearching and hand-wringing get a bit maudlin. We're ever so much happier when Madeline takes a break from her quest to talk trash with her foul-mouthed friends. Denise Mina's latest novel challenges us to reflect on how a violent act can unravel even a close-knit family.
Library Journal Review
Reformed socialite Madeline Dare (A Field of Darkness) begins a new chapter in her life and consciousness when she discovers the skeletal remains of a toddler in her family's neglected private cemetery and determines to seek justice for the child. Part mystery, part character piece, and part social treatise on race and class relations, Read's third mystery is interesting and well written; her dialog and character descriptions are compelling. Verdict This will appeal to readers fond of Daniel Judson, Laura Lippman, and Peter Abrahams.-Nicole A. Cooke, Montclair State Univ. Lib., NJ (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.