Synopsis
Set in a small town that houses little more than a research lab and an engineering school, the body of the lab's director is found in a pit used for maternal deprivation experiments with monkeys. A few days later, a graduate student is found murdered as well. Are these deaths connected? And who's responsible for these murders? Written by one of America's greatest poets, this mystery is a scathing social commentary with a criminal twist.
Maxine Kumin is the author of poetry, novels, short stories, essays and a number of children's books. She has received several awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, the Poets' Prize, the Levinson Prize, and most recently, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. She lives in Warner, New Hampshire.
Reviews
Here's a genuine sleeper: a small book from a nonprofit literary press ostensibly about the subject of animal rights, which turns out to be one of the best mysteries of the year. Of course, it helps that Kumin is a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet (Up Country, 1973), as well as a novelist, essayist and writer of memorable children's books. This short novel bristles with richly developed characters. There's the Baranoff family: Dr. Hal, the brilliant but widely disliked director of a psychological research institute in a small town on the edge of Southern California's desert; his fraternal twin brother, Vance, a once promising novelist now living on his brother's reluctant charity while consoling Hal's wife, Susie; Hal's own teenage fraternal twins, Rachel and Reuben, both disturbed by their father's experiments involving the effects of separating monkey mothers and babies. Around them circle a resourceful old police chief, a dying cowboy and a determined graduate student who is both Hal's kinky mistress and the person who handles the details of his cruel experiments. "Actually, she found acting out her daytime part more degrading than being a dominatrix," Kumin writes. "Sadomasochistic sex play was only a game. Behavioral psych was the gateway to a career." The plot is a masterpiece of construction: two kidnappings (one simian, one human) lead to two deaths (only one of which is obviously a murder). And while Kumin never actually misdirects, she doles out her essential pieces in such a fiendishly clever manner that not until the last few pages will even the sharpest readers be able to put the whole puzzle together. (Sept.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
In the little kingdom of Montandino, California, Chief of Police Diego (Digger) Martinez is the Eagle, and Dr. Harold Baranoff is the king. Brought in to revitalize the Graysmith Lab, Hal Baranoff has moved into primate experimentation with a single-mindedness that's attracted the well-publicized opposition of animal-rights activist Carla Strombaugh and the terrorists calling themselves the Mercy Bandits. He's also replaced the cancer-stricken head janitor with a Latino who'll work for minimum wage, dismissed a graduate student who was getting too friendly with another student Hal was sleeping with, revived an old quarrel with his twin brother Vancewho's still in love with Hal's wife Susieand alienated his own twin children, Rachel and Reuben, who are willing to break into his lab to free a pair of squirrel monkeys. So it's not so surprising that he'd be found dead one Easter, soon after receiving an anonymous threat: ``QUIT MONKS OR DIE!'' What's surprising is the way he's found: huddled in the bottom of a pit used to test the chemical reactions of macaque monkeys to despair. Pulitzer poet Kumin (Women, Animals, and Vegetables: Essays and Stories, 1994, etc.) uses a clipped, nervously understated style that cuts back and forth between Digger's investigation and events leading up to Hal's death to create a viselike pressure on his final hours, showing how they took shape from the actions of every human primate he'd used. Kumin's stylish riddles come packaged with just enough clues to deepen their mystery till the quiet fadeout. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Poet and essayist Kumin has dispensed with lyricism in her first murder mystery, but her love of animals, which permeates her poetic works, is present in full force as the impetus for this neatly plotted tale. The setting is a small California desert town dependent on the Grayson Research Laboratory for its economic well-being. A prestigious behavioral sciences facility, Grayson is known for its work with children, but its arrogant director, Hal, is also conducting cruel and clandestine experiments with monkeys. Word has gotten out, however, and all kinds of folks are riled, including Hal's children, the twins Rachel and Reuben, and his own twin brother, Vance, his opposite in temperament and values. As monkeys disappear, affairs are revealed, and corpses are discovered, Kumin nimbly switches points of view among a circle of likable characters, including Diego "Digger" Martinez, the town's overweight, forthright, and patient chief of police. Kumin's big challenge here was to avoid didacticism while voicing her outrage over animal testing, and, fine storyteller that she is, she succeeds. Donna Seaman
Emphasis on characterization helps this short mystery into a higher literary class, as author Kumin delves into the controversial world of animal-rights activism. The uniqueness of this subject as a mystery milieu adds an exotic flavor to the otherwise academic setting. In a small town in the Southwest, Dr. Harold Baranoff, director of the Graysmith Research Laboratory, is found dead in a monkeys' pit used for maternal deprivation experiments. A few days later, the director's young female graduate student is found murdered. Complicating matters are the activities of the Mercy Bandits, a group of animal-rights terrorists. Kumin, winner of numerous literary prizes, including a Pulitzer, presents the reader with a small town's gamut of characters, contrasting the natives with the behaviorists who have taken up residence. Ultimately, no character seems emotionally compelling; the big-eyed monkeys reap the sympathyAand maybe that's the point. For large mystery collections.AMargaret A. Smith, Grace A. Dow Memorial Lib., Midland, MI
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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