C. S. O'Cinneide
Autor de Petra's Ghost
Series
Obras de C. S. O'Cinneide
The Starr Sting Scale 1 copia
Etiquetado
Conocimiento común
- Nombre legal
- Kennedy, Carole
- Fecha de nacimiento
- 20th century
- Género
- female
- Nacionalidad
- Canada
- Lugar de nacimiento
- Toronto, Ontario, Canada
- Lugares de residencia
- Guelph, Ontario, Canada
- Educación
- University of Toronto
- Ocupaciones
- IT analyst
- Organizaciones
- Crime Writers of Canada
Horror Writers Association
Sisters in Crime
International Thriller Writers
Miembros
Reseñas
Starr Sign: The Candace Starr Series (The Candace… por C.S. O'Cinneide
Another book that I read due to the Edgar nomination and a good example of why I read from the list. I probably never would have given this ex-assassin turns detective a chance, but I’d have been missing out on a light but entertaining read. The plot strains credulity more than a bit, but just go along for the ride and you night enjoy it
For me, reading 'Eve's Rib' was like trying to move forward across the deck of a ship in a storm, I kept losing my footing and being taken by surprise. It was exciting and unsettling at the same time.
It's not that 'Eve's Rib' is difficult to read. It's a compelling, propulsive story told using clear narratives from three characters: Eve (an author of a humorous series of books about a tall hitwoman), Richard (Eve's husband) and Abbey (Eve's daughter). The feeling of being off balance came from my 'I know what genre this is' expectations being wrong more often than they were right. I kept mentally stepping unexpectedly into thin air as the plot shifted away from the formulae I expected and into something more original and unusual and much more explosive.
'Eve's Rib' is a genre-crossing story that has to be taken on its own terms. It's a unique blend of witchcraft and psychopathy, serial killers and domestic drama driven by guilt, doubt and love that creates a menace-laden tale.
The prologue set me up for a witchy tale somewhere between 'The Rules Of Magic' and 'Crossroads'. We have a witch struggling with a series of miscarriages and a deal made with the devil, or at least with the Ragman who sounds like a close associate.
Eve's initial narrative, set eighteen years later, sent me into 'strong wife in peril' domestic psychological thriller land. It starts with Eve alone at the ER with a broken rib and a set of secrets, one of which is how her rib was broken. When she returns home it's clear she's grieving for her five-years-dead child, struggling to communicate with her abrasive, dismissive adolescent daughter and frustrated with her emotionally absent husband who wants to tidy her away so that he doesn't have to watch her cope with the pain from her broken rib. Eve's narrative is full of small, closely observed details that feel real, like the transparent way Abbey manipulates her father to get what she wants and the dismissive way she treats Eve and how Eve has to move everything that Richard puts in the dishwasher to put them where they should be. I ended it thinking, 'I know where this is going.'
I didn't.
The next chapter was an extract from Abbey's journal and now I was somewhere else, somewhere closer to Demon Seed or The Omen. I loved Abbey's voice. It was bright, clever, entitled and spiky. But, from the very beginning, her journal felt performative and untrustworthy or at least, self-serving. Here's an example:
I’m starting this journal so I can set down the real story, and so I can say how I truly feel, and not keep it in like I always do. I don’t care if my mom reads it, or whether it’ll hurt her to hear the things I have to say. She should know who she is by now. She may think she’s the only writer in the family, coughing up those silly crime novels for her publisher every year, but she isn’t. She doesn’t even make any money at her writing, not really. She hasn’t earned out one of her advances. So selfish.
O'Cinneide, C.S. . Eve's Rib (p. 21). Dundurn Press. Kindle Edition.
The next chapter was from Richard's point of view and showed me a weak, self-pitying, damaged man cheating on his wife and incapable either of stopping or of facing up to what he was doing. I was back to betrayal and secrets and psychological thriller land but I knew there was more to it than that.
As the book continued, I started to understand that all three narrators were unreliable, either knowingly or subconsciously and that they all had secrets and unclear loyalties that they tended to lie to others and or themselves and that they were locked in a miserable family life, blighted by guilt and doubt and known but unacknowledged betrayals.
Yet this was more than an unflinching portrayal of family life. The magic was real and some of it was malevolent. There was a serial killer at work, who may or may not be one of the family. There was a slowly growing sense of dread and a promise of violence that was made more menacing by the shifting points of view and by the difficulty in being certain who was a hero and who was a villain.
I found 'Eve's Rib' disturbing because it sucked me into that atmosphere of guilt, doubt and betrayal and left me with the feeling that none of this would end well.
In the last third of the book, as secrets are revealed, the body count rises, and possible threats substantiate into fatal violence, I found myself wrapped up in the book as a thriller and I needed to read on and find out who would survive and how.
Yet, at the end of the book, I realised that not all the lies had been revealed and doubt and suspicion remained. I rather liked that.
'Eve's Rib' works perfectly well as a standalone novel but I hope that there will a sequel. I don't think I'm done with Eve and Abbey yet. They have one of the most compelling and plausible and fraught mother-daughter relationships I've come across. Richard? Yeh, him I'm done with.… (más)
It's not that 'Eve's Rib' is difficult to read. It's a compelling, propulsive story told using clear narratives from three characters: Eve (an author of a humorous series of books about a tall hitwoman), Richard (Eve's husband) and Abbey (Eve's daughter). The feeling of being off balance came from my 'I know what genre this is' expectations being wrong more often than they were right. I kept mentally stepping unexpectedly into thin air as the plot shifted away from the formulae I expected and into something more original and unusual and much more explosive.
'Eve's Rib' is a genre-crossing story that has to be taken on its own terms. It's a unique blend of witchcraft and psychopathy, serial killers and domestic drama driven by guilt, doubt and love that creates a menace-laden tale.
The prologue set me up for a witchy tale somewhere between 'The Rules Of Magic' and 'Crossroads'. We have a witch struggling with a series of miscarriages and a deal made with the devil, or at least with the Ragman who sounds like a close associate.
Eve's initial narrative, set eighteen years later, sent me into 'strong wife in peril' domestic psychological thriller land. It starts with Eve alone at the ER with a broken rib and a set of secrets, one of which is how her rib was broken. When she returns home it's clear she's grieving for her five-years-dead child, struggling to communicate with her abrasive, dismissive adolescent daughter and frustrated with her emotionally absent husband who wants to tidy her away so that he doesn't have to watch her cope with the pain from her broken rib. Eve's narrative is full of small, closely observed details that feel real, like the transparent way Abbey manipulates her father to get what she wants and the dismissive way she treats Eve and how Eve has to move everything that Richard puts in the dishwasher to put them where they should be. I ended it thinking, 'I know where this is going.'
I didn't.
The next chapter was an extract from Abbey's journal and now I was somewhere else, somewhere closer to Demon Seed or The Omen. I loved Abbey's voice. It was bright, clever, entitled and spiky. But, from the very beginning, her journal felt performative and untrustworthy or at least, self-serving. Here's an example:
I’m starting this journal so I can set down the real story, and so I can say how I truly feel, and not keep it in like I always do. I don’t care if my mom reads it, or whether it’ll hurt her to hear the things I have to say. She should know who she is by now. She may think she’s the only writer in the family, coughing up those silly crime novels for her publisher every year, but she isn’t. She doesn’t even make any money at her writing, not really. She hasn’t earned out one of her advances. So selfish.
O'Cinneide, C.S. . Eve's Rib (p. 21). Dundurn Press. Kindle Edition.
The next chapter was from Richard's point of view and showed me a weak, self-pitying, damaged man cheating on his wife and incapable either of stopping or of facing up to what he was doing. I was back to betrayal and secrets and psychological thriller land but I knew there was more to it than that.
As the book continued, I started to understand that all three narrators were unreliable, either knowingly or subconsciously and that they all had secrets and unclear loyalties that they tended to lie to others and or themselves and that they were locked in a miserable family life, blighted by guilt and doubt and known but unacknowledged betrayals.
Yet this was more than an unflinching portrayal of family life. The magic was real and some of it was malevolent. There was a serial killer at work, who may or may not be one of the family. There was a slowly growing sense of dread and a promise of violence that was made more menacing by the shifting points of view and by the difficulty in being certain who was a hero and who was a villain.
I found 'Eve's Rib' disturbing because it sucked me into that atmosphere of guilt, doubt and betrayal and left me with the feeling that none of this would end well.
In the last third of the book, as secrets are revealed, the body count rises, and possible threats substantiate into fatal violence, I found myself wrapped up in the book as a thriller and I needed to read on and find out who would survive and how.
Yet, at the end of the book, I realised that not all the lies had been revealed and doubt and suspicion remained. I rather liked that.
'Eve's Rib' works perfectly well as a standalone novel but I hope that there will a sequel. I don't think I'm done with Eve and Abbey yet. They have one of the most compelling and plausible and fraught mother-daughter relationships I've come across. Richard? Yeh, him I'm done with.… (más)
I first met Candace Starr, a trying-hard-to-retire-and-not-quite-managing-it hitwoman, in 'The Starr Sting Scale'. Having an assassin as your main character is a tough pitch. I'd expected either to get a fatalistic anti-hero or a witty, lighthearted, Stephanie Plum gone over to the dark side. I got neither.
Candace Starr is a killer and she's good at it. How she got there is as much about pain and betrayal and the criminal world she was born into as it is to do with Candace's innate character but Candace knows you can't blame mommy and daddy forever, especially when daddy was killed by the mob and mommy ran off when you were too young to know what was going on. So, she plays the hand she's dealt, keeps her distance from people, drinks a lot, tries never to show fear and only kills people if she has to or if they really deserve it.
I ended the book thinking 'Wow, what a find!' so when I saw the second book was due, I pre-ordered it. By the time I was two chapters in I decided to kill my plans for the day and spend it reading 'Starr Sign'. It was a well-written rollercoaster lubricated by dry humour, close observation of people and propelled by the energy of a central character who judges everyone harshly, especially herself.
Candace isn't an anti-hero. She's not a good person doing bad things for the right reasons. She tries not to get involved at all if she can help it. But, when family is involved, you've sometimes got to do things. Even if you're tempted to do all the wrong things.
In this story, Candace gets dragged into a confrontation with the Detroit mob as she reluctantly looks for the mother she barely knew on behalf of a half-sister she's only just discovered exists.
The plot is clever. It feints like a skilled boxer and I fell for it every time, so the ending came as a surprise.
All the characters are well-drawn from the psychpathically violent to the instinctively nice. I rather liked that Candace had more difficulty figuring out the two people who were being nice to her (a guy she has sex with and who then got swept up in the action because he likes Candace - go figure and a younger sister with a mean mouth but who still expects to be loved) than the ones who were threatening her (family members mostly).
There's a nice balance between wit, action and character development that kept me engaged.
I'm sure I missed some of the Canadian jokes but I found myself having to resist the urge to highlight something on each page. Even so, I'd like to share my favourite quotes to give you a flavour of being in Candace's head.
Here's Candace at the start of the book, hungover and ready to drink more:
“My daily drinking is just a means to an end. I’m not sure what that end is, but I intend not to be sober when I meet it.”
Candace's reaction to meeting a vegetarian:
“Vegetarians are supposed to live longer, but I think it just feels that way to them because their life sucks so much without meat.”
Candace going back to the morgue where she's already caused a scene:
"Luckily, the woman at the receptionist desk is also new. The bitch I dealt with last time treated me too much like the white trash criminal that I am. But when I give this new woman my name, she is either too bored or too clueless to acknowledge what kind of person I am. Then again, she might just be nice. I have trouble telling the difference."
And finally, Candace's reaction to having to figure out how to deal with someone who wants to be her friend:
“Friendship, much like family, seems to come with too many attachments — like a vacuum cleaner too complicated to use.”
I had great fun with this book and I'm hoping this is going to be one of those 'book-a-year-for-ten-years' series that becomes part of my annual calendar.
… (más)
Here's what I wrote about ‘Petra’s Ghost’ immediately after I finished it, a week ago.
'Petra's Ghost' is an emotionally powerful book about guilt and forgiveness. It follows a recently widowed man as he walks the Camino de Santiago. Burdened by guilt over his wife’s death, he begins to doubt his own sanity and we are left to judge how much of his reality we share.
In the intervening days, the book has been haunting my imagination, showing me how real the journey along the Camino had felt to me and how invested I had become in the fate of the characters and most of all of how this portrayal of the challenges and possibilities of forgiveness had touched me.
Some of the power of 'Petra's Ghost' comes from how well described the journey along the Camino is. This isn't a romanticised travelogue or tourist promo. It's more in the nature of a remembered experience. All the geographical, historical and cultural reference points are there, but they are subordinate to the sense of the power of the Camino over the pilgrims. It speaks of walking along on a shared path. Of stepping outside of your day to day life. Of seeking... something. Self-knowledge? Change? A hope for the future? A release from the past?. The Camino calls pilgrims to understand what they really want from it and what they're prepared to give to get it.
Then there is the power of the main character, Daniel who is at once a likeable, down-to-earth man and a man whose sense of self is being eroded by grief and guilt about the death of his wife, to the point where he and we doubt his sanity. He is a man unable to stand still or move forward. Lost to himself. Carrying his wife's ashes with him but not sure what to do with them. A man who is in motion because he cannot decide where to stand.
I found Daniel an easy man to identify with. He's an almost secular Catholic and yet he's committed himself to a spiritual pilgrimage. When he's asked by an American travelling companion if he's a devout Catholic he says:
“I’m not one for Mass every Sunday, if that’s what you’re saying.” The last time Daniel had been to a full Mass was the funeral. He and Petra had gone to church only irregularly. They liked the idea of taking time out to pay their respects to God, but they enjoyed sleeping in on a Sunday morning.
When his companion presses further and asks if he believes in everything the Catholic Church says, he gives a reply that I've heard many times:
“Most of it.” “Most of it?” “Sure, there are things I disagree with.”
His answer to the follow-up question was not one I'd heard before but it sums up what being a Catholic means to many of the people I grew up with who, unlike me, have not 'lapsed' into atheism:
“If you disagree with it, why are you still a Catholic?” “Are there things the U.S. government is after doing that you don’t agree with?” he asks. “I suppose.” “And yet, you don’t stop being an American, now do you?”
So here's a man who knows himself. Who is normally comfortable in his own skin. A man who loved his wife. A man who has left the family farm in Ireland and made a life for himself as an Engineer in America. The thing I kept asking myself was: why is a man like this making a pilgrimage along the Camino?
A lot of the book is about Daniel finding the answer to that question.
A lot of what makes the book stand out is the novel way in which this is achieved.
Instead of offering deep internal meditations or curated discussions of spiritual themes with fellow pilgrims, the author gave me something much more interesting: ghosts.
As Daniel journeys along the Camino, carrying his wife's ashes like a penance, he starts to feel that he is being stalked by something violent and malevolent. Daniel isn't entirely sure whether he can trust his own eyes or whether he is losing his mind.
These instances grow more frequent and more threatening and Daniel starts to lose his grip on himself. He stops having the regular Skype sessions with his sister that have kept him tethered to his family in Ireland by regular. He admits to himself that he is seeing things that others cannot see. He starts to feel that the guilty secret he is carrying with him about the death of his wife is costing him his sanity.
I admired the way I was kept guessing about whether the ghosts were real or only in Daniel's head and whether or not the answer made a difference.
There was no denying the reality of Daniel's grief and guilt and need for forgiveness.
I won't reveal the ending here, except to say that it worked beautifully, making sense of everything I'd seen up to that point. I left the book feeling that I'd shared Daniel's journey not just along the Camino but towards his ability to forgive himself and that it was a journey I believed in.
'Petra's Ghost' is hard to label. It doesn't fit easily into a genre. It sets out to do something difficult and chooses a unique path to do it. It uses an unreliable narrator to show us and him the truth and it does the whole thing with wit and compassion. I recommend it to you.
… (más)
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Estadísticas
- Obras
- 5
- Miembros
- 68
- Popularidad
- #253,411
- Valoración
- 3.8
- Reseñas
- 8
- ISBNs
- 16