Word: whoduniteer
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...hers. Now what? He goes on the run, of course, but flamboyant Malcolm has no talent for keeping his head down. Author Francis is sometimes faulted for wooden characterizations, but here he is believable and chilling as he takes on the pathology of a large, mutually destructive family. The whodunit puzzle at the & book's core is unusually good, and its solution, like those the late Ross Macdonald used to devise, takes into account wounds dealt out and suffered decades before...
...killed Carolyn Polhemus? There is a simple answer to that question, of course, and Presumed Innocent eventually provides it. But the novel has aspirations well beyond those of the run-of-the-mill whodunit. Turow uses Carolyn's grotesque death as a means of exposing the trail of municipal corruption that has spread through Kindle County. The issue is not merely ! whether a murderer will be brought to justice but whether public institutions and their guardians are any longer capable of finding the truth...
...time, to stop The Thanatos Syndrome dead in its tracks. Tom, aided by his young, distant and potentially kissing cousin Lucy Lipscomb, herself a doctor and an epidemiologist, discovers that the local water supply is being laced with heavy sodium from the coolant of a nearby nuclear power plant. Whodunit? Not, it turns out, the National Institutes of Health or the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The villains are a couple of doctors, both known to Tom, who have contrived on their own to salvage the "American social fabric" by doping the local populace...
With Rourke shambling smartly toward his doom, Bonet radiating elfin sensuality, and De Niro looking natty with his fancy jewelry and sulfurous smile, Angel Heart holds the mind and eye throughout. To be sure, even the most attentive viewer may still have one small question at the end: Whodunit? (Frankly, we think it was a satanic frame-up.) It is a question that could provoke more profitable debate than the needless fury raised by the rating board's attempted Heart transplant...
Just a few decades ago, the whodunit formula demanded by both publishers and readers was compact -- and cozy: 180 pages of pure deduction and cardboard characters propped up in a long-gone rural England. Along with a handful of other contemporary crime writers including Dick Francis and Ruth Rendell, P.D. James, 66, has gracefully shattered the rules. In her best and most ambitious tale to date, A Taste for Death -- her ninth mystery novel in 24 years -- James has become a kind of Le Carre of crime, blending the calmer depths of mainstream fiction with the white rapids...