Details

In Reviews

/ Published on 28 January 2008

Set mostly during the American Civil War, this is the story of young Irish migrant Willie Burke, the black woman he touches to read and the Northern abolitionist whom he loves. As the vortex of the Civil War sweeps away lives, livelihoods and love affairs, the tale explores the moral choices confronting Willie, Flower Jamison and Abigail Downling as the tumult tears apart the genteel culture of the Old South and exposes the brutal and brutalised underclass on whose back it was built. James Lee Burke uses major battles of the Civil War, at Shiloh, Shenandoah and Louisiana, as set pieces to punctuate his story of love, loss and liberation. It is not a history book, but an historical novel, using an epic setting to explore how Willie and his women discover their true characters in this punishing time. While the battle scenes are brutal, as is the treatment meted out to blacks in the South, the story is permeated with a surprising tenderness and confidence in the power of human kindness.

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Details

In Reviews

/ Published on 22 January 2008

This is one of Deaver’s Lincoln Rhyme novels, about a quadriplegic criminalist who solves crimes from a forensic lab in his Upper West Side apartment, by Central Park. When Rhyme is called in after two apparent homicides in lower Manhattan Island, attributed to the self-named Watchmaker, he is irked that his offsider and girlfriend, Amelia Sachs, appears distracted by a seemingly commonplace suicide. At each murder scene, the Watchmaker leaves a poem and a distinctive clock. Deaver also introduces Kathryn Dance, his Californian FBI “kinesics” expert in body language and interrogation (his latest novel is about her). The cop story is counterpointed with the tale of a sex-crazed halfwit named Vincent Reynolds who is the sidekick (or perhaps dropkick) for the icy killer Gerald Duncan – aka the Watchmaker.

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