Word: twistingly
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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James Lee Burke won an Edgar award from the Mystery Writers of America for Black Cherry Blues, a 1989 novel about Cajun detective Dave Robicheaux, a recovering alcoholic and avenging angel. There's a New Age-ish twist to most of Burke's work. In the Electric Mist with Confederate Dead (Hyperion; 344 pages; $19.95) is haunted by not one but two ghosts: a black man Robicheaux saw murdered as a teenager whose corpse resurfaces, and a Civil War officer sometimes accompanied by battered but unbowed troops. Throw in the Mafia, visiting Hollywood moviemakers, a serial killer and such fillips...
...same number as those trapped in Srebrenica -- confronted Nazi troops in a final, hopeless battle. Back then the outside knew little and could do less about what was afoot. But the horror of the last days of Srebrenica could not be ignored by a world kept abreast of every twist and turn in the bloody Bosnian conflict. Despite a hardened stance forged in an emergency Security Council session on Saturday night, the guardians of the much touted new international order appeared at a loss to bring a definitive end to a war that has already claimed at least...
...slums and ghettoes of London have provided inspiration for generations of artists. Steven Berkoff's East, a hodge-podge collection of abstract scenes and monologues concerning one London family's daily life, draws on the squalid conditions and pervasive violence that spawned works from Oliver Twist to A Clockwork Orange. Conscious of this tradition, East makes an early reference to its setting as the turf "the blessed Jack" stalked. The play concerns the East End of London as much as the people who live...
James weaves all these themes into a knuckle-whitening story which keeps the reader avidly turning the pages, right up to the fabulously ambiguous conclusion. Her capacity to astonish with an utterly unexpected twist shines forth on several occasions she characterizes Faron with detail and insight: he occupies a different league from her standard murder mystery suspects. Her projection of the future manages to be both darkly visionary and depressingly realistic...
More importantly, James ultimately dodges the questions which she raises in the book. The issues which consume Faron's thoughts societal decay, the corruption of power, grief, and love-are resolved by a plot twist. A baby is born, and all the world's problems melt into insignificance...