Review by Booklist Review
You can't blame Higgins for wanting to get away from the old neighborhood, but if you write dialogue, you need to hang with good talkers. Elocution aside, the society types onboard the cruise ship in Higgins' latest novel can't play in the same league with the Beantown lowlifes whose less-than-dulcet tones we've come to love in the author's previous work. Onboard the America is a troubled middle-aged couple, David and Francis Carroll: David's bank is under investigation, and Francis is reeling from her husband's past infidelities. The cruise, from England to the U.S., presents a new challenge: onboard is one of David's former playmates. The action is minimal, but the talk is plentiful, as the Carrolls dine with their tablemate, who may or may not be a con man. Life stories are exchanged, intimacies established, betrayals effected, and thousands of calories consumed. If these characters' commentary on the slow unraveling of their lives feels a bit bloodless in comparison to Higgins' coptalk or crooktalk, we can't help but admire an author who makes jumping from hard-boiled to Henry James look as easy as clearing your throat. --Bill Ott
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Though Higgins's trademark Boston lowlifes, pols and lawyers are absent from this moderately engaging detour into high society, his trademark long monologues are definitely present: the protagonist's opening screed against federal bureaucrats runs to about 7000 words. Sixty-ish Massachusetts banker David Carroll and his wife, Frances, are on the London-to-New York maiden voyage of a refurbished luxury liner, a trip that Frances booked even though, 12 years earlier, David had a fling with the liner's 30-year-old marketing manager, Melissa. The Carrolls are forced to share a table with elegant retired Yankee Burton Rutledge, who regales them with stories of his late wife, her life and lovesat every meal for five days. Rutledge's tale is often convoluted, containing dialogue within dialogue. It's unlikely and ambiguous as well (Is Rutledge ever telling the truth?), and the Carrolls come off as self-absorbed and boring. But Higgins (Bomber's Law) keeps everything aloft on clouds of effortless hot airor at least until the shaggy-dog ending. Rights: ICM. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Higgins usually prefers a seedy setting, but his new work takes place in the first-class dining room of an ocean liner. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Taking a holiday from his usual diet of lowlife Boston cops and crooks (Bomber's Law, 1993, etc.), Higgins books passage on the luxury liner America, where the upscale cast talks exactly like the downscale Higgins regulars back home. Racked with anxiety over the federal examiners baying at his recession-ridden Pilot Hill Bank and Trust, David Carroll allows his wife Frances to sweep him off for a week in London and on the recommissioned America's ``re-maiden voyage,'' as America staffer (and David's former mistress) Melissa Murray describes it. Frances knows all about Melissa, and thinks she's going into the trip with her eyes wide open; but she doesn't know that a confidence man aboard the ship, presumably retired attorney Burton Rutledge, has picked her and her husband as marks. Promptly at dinner the first night out, Rutledge presents himself at the Carrolls' table; the action thereafter, as you'd expect from Higgins, unfolds almost entirely over a series of mealtime conversations among the Carrolls and Rutledge--a virtuoso series of trios eventually reduced to duets by the Melissa'd absence of David. Even among Higgins's gallery of talkers, Rutledge is one silver-tongued sharpie: His ceremonious tales of his old acquaintance, dilettante Eldred Motley, and the vicissitudes of Amy Neville Motley Rutledge, their mutual wife, are worth the transatlantic tariff. Rutledge is so peerlessly garrulous, in fact, that the drama of the tale arises, á la Exterminating Angel, from your wondering whether the Carrolls are going to make it through their next rich dessert, or all the way to New York, without hearing Rutledge's pitch, or whether they'll end up eternally trapped, like the Flying Dutchman, mid-ocean and pre- fleecing. Have no fear: Higgins, obviously seeing the Statue of Liberty looming on the horizon, settles everything with a few brisk strokes, clearing the way for a peremptory ending but a satisfyingly bleak final tableau.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Review by Booklist Review
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Review by Library Journal Review
Review by Kirkus Book Review
