Customer Reviews

The Fate of Katherine Carr

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Edgar award winner Thomas H. Cook delivers one of the finest tension filled mysteries out there. This is mystery writing at its most imaginative, provocative and captivating. If you don't have a lot of time to find an exceptional read then get your hands on this book. The story is chilling and haunting. There is a menacing dark sustained drive here that will keep you guessing and turning pages until the last one. . If you want to go on a roller coaster ride.....
One of the many qualities that makes this read unique is its simple texture. It is not just a fine mystery, it is a special piece of literature. The reader feels that each word is carefully chosen-written to compel, to push the book forward with more and more intensity and agitation. An exceptional offering.

Katherine Carr disappeared twenty years ago. She is the mystery that Arlo McBride, the retired homicide detective has never forgotten. She left behind poems and a story and little else.

George Gates, once a travel writer, has something he can't leave behind; the death of his eight year old son, killed by a predator, the mystery never solved. Alice Barrows is leaving everything behind. She is twelve years old and dying from progeria.

In this beautiful story of vengeance, redemption and hope the fates of Alice and George and Katherine are woven together, in Cook's always luminous prose. Cook writes in allusions and metaphors and pictures so that you see the story as he writes it, with an immediacy of description that keeps the reader turning the pages. I'm not sure why I devoured the book but it was some combination of gorgeous writing, great characters and solid plotting. Nothing is ever outlandish but Cook takes you further and further from the mundane and you find yourself hoping and believing for all the characters.

If you have never read Cook? Start with this one. This book is a rare treat.

George Gates is a former travel writer and investigator of historical mysteries who has retreated to safe, superficial newspaper writing after his young son was kidnaped and murdered. He then gets sucked into the mystery of what happened to a local writer (Katherine Carr) who walked out of her house one day in 1987 and vanished, leaving behind a mysterious story that seems to relate to her own life. He also becomes involved (both professionally and emotionally) with a 12-year-old girl dying of progeria (the "aging" disease), with whom he reads through the story, attempting to find clues to what happened to Katherine.

I think of this book as structured like a spiral, going from Gates' telling of his own story to a man he meets after the events of the book, to his investigation of Katherine's disappearance, to Katherine's story from 20 years before, and back. On the way it provides an interesting meditation on the effects of loss and crime (especially unsolved crime) on its victims; not only has Gates lost his son, but Katherine had become a virtual recluse before her disappearance due to a vicious beating she had suffered a few years before. The ending is rather ambiguous, though, and the whole book seems unfocused - possibly a necessary effect of its structure and content, but that may account for the lack of complete satisfaction on my part.

P.S. As with other books I've seen or read lately, the cover bugs the hell out of me. It appears to be a young (pre-adolescent) girl, though it's hard to tell since the close-up cuts off most of the face. The only character who fits that description is dying of premature aging and wheelchair-bound. Why is it considered so unacceptable in some circles to have a cover that bears some relation to the content of the book?

I've read a number of the author's books and, while some are quite good, others by comparison are duds. This book falls into the latter category. It deals heavily with atrocities and their perpetrators (both historical and in the characters' lives), the resulting injustice and effects on those left behind. Unless you're interested in such things for their own sake, however, there's little to justify the amount of morbid material and maudlin wallowing in it by the characters.

The story is told by a man (George Gates) traveling on a boat down a tropical river. He lost his young son to an unknown murderer some years back, but the story he tells to a fellow passenger is one told to him by a detective back home. The detective's story involves the title character, a missing person from long ago. But central to the story of Katherine Carr is a manuscript she herself left behind, which is a story of hers in which a character (Maldrow) has his own story to reveal. We thus get the story-within-a-story approach carried to a remote depth. We also have the parallel story of George reading Katherine's story to a dying girl. It's in installments, of course, both for her and us, so we are left waiting for its denouement through most of the novel.

These devices, though strained, might be okay if there were resolution enough to justify them. I found this wanting, however, so that the many layers of story-telling (along with heavy drinking by George and others) serve mostly as disclaimers for the more fantastic episodes. The reader is often left to wonder whether something actually happened (within the novel) or not, as if it doesn't matter. George's relationship with the dying girl seems superfluous, yet another framework for the amorphous inner story.

"The Fate of Katherine Carr" is not only an intriguing story about a woman who disappears, it is an erudite examination of evil in the world and the human need for moral justice. As always, Cook's characters are clearly drawn and fascinating. His extraordinary facility with language and his intriguing plots surpass that of most contemporary writers. This is good literature that stimulates the imagination and entertains. We have read many of Thomas Cook's novels and eagerly await his next publication.

What a joy it is to have the opportunity to read Thomas H. Cook. A truly great writer who doesn't seem to receive the recognition and accolades he deserves. To me there is no better recent mystery novel then "The Chatham School Affair." This new novel comes very close.
"The Fate of Katherine Carr" is a compelling novel that dares to be different in how the story unfolds. There are humorous references throughout the story to the mystery genre like the Nero Wolfe stories. Even a poke of fun at the traditional CLUE game and how most mysteries are written. The tale expands with insighful Cook metaphors like "...the memories of lost sons." There are homages to the master Edgar Poe and others throughout the mystery tale. Delicious and fun to read. The multilayer approach Cook deploys this time has a novel within a novel about a dead poet investigated by a travel writer trying to solve several abductions. How much fun is that for a book filled with a dark and terror-filled "main" mystery?
With this novel, Cook continues as the ultimate wordsmith and he continually delights the reader with his sentences that fall from the tongue like warmed honey. The ominous mood of abdusctions and serial killers fills the book with a haunting dread of intrigue.
I stopped all my other reading to finish this novel. The way Cook tells the multiple tales and weaves them into one conclusion is nothing short of masterful. Perhaps I was wrong, but I understood at the end of the book that the murderer of the protagonist Gates' son was indeed revealed. Just as Cook alludes to earlier - read the clues and discoveries and the killer will be exposed. Perhaps his metaphysical portrayal of those people/ghosts who can help expose the killers among us was a third tale within the novel. Absolutely fascinating.
If you like great writing and are a fan of mystery stories, I highly recommend this wonderful book. Thomas H. Cook: you are the best!

George Gates was a travel writer, but since his young son was murdered he no longer has a taste for the road or the stories he once wrote. Now he works for the local newspaper and writes human-interest stories about local events and personalities.

His life changes when George meets a retired cop at his local pub that worked an unsolved disappearance of a young poet in 1987. The young woman--Katherine Carr--disappeared without a trace, but she left behind a story about a woman being stalked, a story with a main character who shared her name, and very possibly her fate.

The story powerfully resonates with George, and for the first time in years he is interested in something beyond booze and memories. He also meets a young girl with the premature aging disease progeria who seems to have an insight into Katherine's disappearance as well as an understanding of George and his dead son.

THE FATE OF KATHERINE CARR is an uneven novel; at times it feels powerful and strident, while at other moments it feels contrived and forced. The prose is wispy and haunting--

"The story came to me by way of Arlo McBride, a man whose eyes seemed oddly shattered."

The characters are rich and fully developed, but the story tends to meander from its forward momentum and balances precariously on atmosphere and dread--the dread of loneliness, failure and betrayal. This plodding works well for much of the novel, but in the end it feels too heavy and opaque to be completely successful.

-Gravetapping

Seldom as a story hooked me as much as "The Fate of Katherine Carr". Here the shocking, the mysterious, and the supernatural(?) are mixed together in a multiple story format addressing the injustice of fate and the search for a spiritual antidote to all this injustice. Nothing is solved, of course, the reader is left to ponder what it all means. But the unresolved fate of the characters left me turning the pages, hardly able to put the book down. Well done.

This is truly an emotion filled mystery that handles the subject of missing persons and child victims with a captivating multi-layered tale. The writing was beautifully descriptive and characters touchingly fragile. A reporter who suffers after the murder of his own child researches two subjects; a detective with a haunting unsolved case and precocious young girl dieing from Progeria, an aging disease. This book made me drop all my other reading and stole my attention until the very satisfying ending and beyond. This is my first experience with this author who has many other titles I will be looking at though I can't imagine how The Fate Katherine Carr can be topped.

George Gates is a former travel writer, who after the disappearance/kidnapping and murder of his son, now writes "puff" pieces for the local paper. A chance encounter leads him to a former detective, Arlo, who tells him of a missing persons case that continues to haunt him, Katherine Carr. We follow George as he investigates and tries to learn more about Katherine and what happened to her. Her story is convoluted by a brutal attack years prior to her disappearance and her writings, including a short story that seems to parallel her life. Intermixed are George's interactions with a girl with progeria who is fascinated by Katherine. George is also dealing with his guilt over his son's death and there are hints in the story of the local presence of his killer. The story leaves you with many mysteries to ponder.