Amazon.com Review
Irene Marcuse's first novel is a delicately delineated triumph, a quiet mystery that revolves around character and setting rather than hotly pursued clues and frantic detection. Anita Servi, a Manhattan social worker, has made a career of tending to the city's elderly. Crippled by arthritis, plagued by shrinking Social Security checks, relegated to dilapidated residence hotels that, with their fading paint and chipped brickwork, "look like the eccentric aunt who didn't get invited to the wedding over on Broadway," her clients still amaze her with their resilience. All the more shocking, then, for Anita and her daughter Clea to stumble over the body of Lillian Raines on their apartment landing. A former client, now homeless, the frail but dignified "Lady of the Landing" had become a fixture in their daily lives. Though the police term Lillian's death an accident, Anita is unconvinced. As she digs deeper into the old woman's shadowy past, ancient grievances come to light, weaving the fixtures of Anita's life--friends, neighbors, clients, coworkers--into an uneasy web of deception and murder. When more elderly women are threatened, it's up to Anita to unravel the tangled threads.
The sights, sounds, and smells of New York's Upper West Side permeate the book. The city bustles and hums, stretching out before Anita and the reader in an intoxicating, vibrant landscape: "Broadway, the street, puts on as good a show as any theater on the Great White Way. One time, Catherine and I saw a tall black man gamboling around in nothing but a pair of red wool socks. Two cops chased after him, lumbering hippos to his graceful gazelle. It made both our days. Who needs TV talk shows?" For all of its pollution and poverty, New York, through Anita's eyes, softens into an appealingly ungainly, overgrown village. It's the kind of place where all one's creature comforts and quotidian rituals may be satisfied in just a few square blocks, where anonymity gives way to recognition.
Marcuse's affectionately drawn characters, canny dialogue, and adept sense of pace set The Death of an Amiable Child far above the usual cadre of earnest but awkward first novels. Readers should look forward with eager anticipation to Anita Servi's next urban appearance. --Kelly Flynn
From Publishers Weekly
Social worker and transplanted Californian Anita Servi, her cabinetmaker husband, Bruno, and their adopted daughter, Clea, live in a prewar co-op on Manhattan's Upper West Side in this compassionate debut novel. Many of Anita's elderly neighbors are clients at her agency at the nearby Cathedral of St. John the Divine. A typical crazed Monday morning turns even more chaotic when Clea discovers the body of a homeless woman, known only as Lillian, on a landing in the co-op. The local police believe she died from a fall. Not convinced, Anita decides to investigate and becomes embroiled in the doings at the building where Lillian lived, seeing clients and avoiding the management, who have their reasons for not wanting her around. Anita eventually learns that Lillian had some good jewelry and a lot of money as well, so why did she live that way? What was she scared of, and why did she spend a lot of time in Riverside Park at the grave of the Amiable Child? As she asks around, Anita discovers that many seniors are afraid of losing their apartments and are being threatened and intimidated. The tough ones remain, but at what cost? Anita and her family enjoy life in an increasingly gentrified neighborhood, where longtime tenants and newcomers with conflicting values and philosophies must navigate the political minefield of co-op life. Bravo to Marcuse, herself a savvy West Sider with a degree in social work, for this entertaining and engrossing puzzle that also calls attention to serious unresolved social problems. Agent, Sandra Dijkstra. (June)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
