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Rick Boyer
YELLOW BIRD (1991, 1992) A Doc Adams Mystery Mass Market Paperback ISBN-10: 0804110360 ISBN-13: 978-0804110365 reviewed by Patrick Killough (1) biblio.com 06/20/2010 YELLOW BIRD is a tale told by Doctor (Doc) Charles Adams, dental surgeon of Concord Massachusetts. It takes place over a few months in 1989, mostly in and around Boston and Cape Cod but also in coastal South Carolina. While walking along a beach one cold January day in the fabulously wealthy village of Osterville, Massachusetts, looking out over Nantucket Sound, Doc and wife Mary hear a shot from a rich man's empty summer "cottage." Three weeks later a corpse is found shot there. It is of a man that Doc and Mary know. And the seventh Doc Adams mystery has legs and is beginning to rollick right along. The plot is fiendishly complex, with excursions to Jamaica and South Carolina. Homosexuality of the victim and others (further probed in a gay bar in Boston) is an important theme and key to solving the murder. The texture and winter weather of Boston are lovingly detailed. The Adams family are gourmet cooks and eaters, as are others key to the plot. Many a recipe is detailed, and favorite eating places described. This novel by Edgar Award winner Rick Boyer is technically polished and well worth reading. Not an easy read, mind you. You cannot skim it or afford to let your mind wander. But read YELLOW BIRD slowly, be on the alert for clues and you will have a ball. Black Mountain, North Carolina resident Rick Boyer is at the opposite end of detective writing theory from, say, G. K. Chesterton and his FATHER BROWN mysteries. Chesterton argued that the ideal detective tale is a short story, with little detailed background to distract from puzzle unraveling. Boyer says, in effect, that when a talented amateur sleuthing team like Doc and wife Mary tackle a mystery, they are not about to give up the other aspects of their lives -- especially eating well-- just to solve a crime. -OOO http://www.biblio.com/cheap-book/yellow-bird-boyer-rick~121d2~97441599 =-=-=-=-=-=-=--=-= (2) lunch.com Title of Review: Did Doc Adams and Wife Mary hear the very shot that killed Doc's friend? Maybe. Maybe not. YELLOW BIRD begins in January 1989 on a beach overlooking Nantucket Sound. Its climax comes in May on a beach in South Carolina. Doc Adams and his wife Mary are unwittingly positioned by drug smugglers to hear a shot fired in a mansion on a posh beach facing Nantucket Sound. Three weeks later a servant, back from Jamaica, discovers there a corpse dead by gunfire. Asked by a State Police lab in Boston to lend a hand in identifying the body, Doc thinks it is a man he had known as a neighbor a few years earlier in Doc's home town of Concord Massachusetts. And the game is afoot. Doc is an oral surgeon. He discovers that the corpse's dental work was done in England. Doc and another pathologist prove that the corpse was malnourished and had cancer as a result of AIDS. Doc, wife Mary and Mary's younger brother Joe Brindelli, a Massachusetts State Police Lieutenant, work together to find out who killed their onetime neighbor and why. Doc and Joe visit a homosexual male bar in Boston and show pictures of the deceased. This and revelations by one of the servants of the mansion move the plot along. There is a lot of sudden rough and tumble action at the very end after Doc has had second thoughts about who that corpse really was or was not. Doc and wife Mary are not as single-minded crime fighters as Mary's professional brother. The married couple fits sleuthing into busy lives as a doctor and a nurse, as gourmet cooks and enthusiastic appreciators of great food. Doc is not above being tempted to hanky panky with a nubile young woman in South Carlolina and Mary is fiery Italian enough to keep Doc on a short leash and to be jealous if he disputes her view that beautiful young women must be dumb. A very good read. Don't be in a rush, however.This book demands your full attention or you will miss clues, red herrings and many bits of information about Cape Cod, pigeons and other excursions into informal education. -OOO- http://www.lunch.com/reviews/rick_boyer_yellow_bird-1479461.html =-=-=-=-=-=-=--=-= (3) bn.com review title: "I like it because it's strange, and strange always provides a lead." reviewer's rating of YELLOW BIRD: * * * * * Posted 6/21/2010: On January 21, 1989 Doc Smith and wife Mary are strolling along a beach in Osterville, Massachusetts. Suddenly they hear a shot fired from the second storey of an empty house. The house obviously belongs to someone rich if not famous and probably wintering in Jamaica or someplace warm. They notice a man and a dog not too far away on the beach. They ring the doorbell. No answer. Mary catches the first few digits of a rental car parked outside. They shrug it off and go back to an open house hosted by a man that Doc hasn't seen since medical school, Jonathan "Randy" Randolph. Three weeks later a domestic servant returns from Jamaica to clean the Osterville beach cottage of Northrop F. (aka Bud aka Pinkie) Chesterton. There, in a house kept barely above freezing, he finds a perfectly preserved corpse -- shot in the chest. It turns out that the body had been shot through one shirt; that first shirt had been removed and replaced by another that did not fit. Strange! And YELLOW BIRD, author Rick Boyer's seventh of nine Doc Adams detective thrillers, is off and running. The murder, including the victim's hidden identity, will be solved over the following four months mainly by Doc Adams and Mary, and Mary's ex-priest kid brother, Massachusetts Lieutenant of State Police, Joe Brindelli. The Adamses are the best witnesses to the murder that the police can find. For that and other reasons, they soon become part of the investigation and repeat visitors to the beach and the crime scene. After the police begin to believe that the victim was killed by a first bullet whose sound the Adamses did not hear, they hypothesize that the second shot that they did hear had been deliberately fired to draw their attention and lead to their misidentifying the corpse as that of George Brenner who used to live in Concord, their home town. Strange? You bet. But strange is good. For strange counts as a clue. As Lieutenant Brindelli sagely opines: "I like it because it's strange, and strange always provides a lead" Ch. 6). As the fiendishly complex plot evolves, Mary and Doc come to see that as masterly a criminal mind as Sherlock Holmes's Moriarity has been playing them like puppets to the criminal's advantage. We are not long in suspecting that smuggling of high grade marijuana from Jamaica has a big role in the murder (and more killings to come) and that Doc Adams and Mary are in danger themselves. As an oral surgeon, Doc is asked to autopsy the face and jaw of the deceased George Brenner: whose early dental work had been expensively done in England, but who at time of death was an emaciated, cancer-stricken homosexual. And yet the George Brenner known to the Adamses had been straight and very healthy the last time they saw him four years earlier. This is a great mystery. Clues are fairly presented and sometimes the reader can grasp a clue as a clue even before Doc or Lieutenant Brindelli. Doc, Mary and Joe have things to do in their lives besides solve crimes. Loving their spouses and enjoying gourmet meals are a large part of their story. Ditto lovingly detailed geographic and historical facets of the novel's settings: Boston, Cape Cod, Nantucket Sound, Jamaica and coastal South Carolina. If you think you can race through YELLOW BIRD in an hour or two, please think again. This is not a novel for gulping down, but for sipping, relishing and mulling over. -OOO- http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Yellow-Bird/Rick-Boyer/ e/9780449905067/?itm=2&USRI=rick+boyer+-+yellow+birds =-=-=-=-=-=-=--=-= (4) amazon.com 06/21/2010 review title: "once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, but three times is enemy action" reviewer's rating of YELLOW BIRD: * * * * * Doctor Charles ("call me Doc, everybody calls me Doc") Adams is a dental surgeon residing and practicing in Concord, Massachusetts. He has a fiery southern Italian wife named Mary, who is an operating room nurse. And they have two grown sons who play no roles in YELLOW BIRD. Very much involved in unraveling the mystery, however, is Mary's younger brother, 45 year old ex-priest, now fast rising Massachusetts State Police Lieutenant Joe Brindelli. Joe, widowed before his brief stint as a priest, and still thinking himself a bearer of evil to anyone he lets near him for the deaths of his first wife and children, has recently remarried long loved Martha Higgins. Under Martha's watchful eye, Joe has lost 37 pounds, is physically fit. YELLOW BIRD is a very, very strange story that all four Adamses and Brindellis have a hand in solving. And please do not think that we shall race a la G. K. Chesterton's FATHER BROWN from clue to clue to denouement paying little heed to our surroundings. That is not author Rick Boyer's way. Doc, Mary, Joe and Martha all have rich lives of their own. Murders can be important. But so is loving your spouse and your children. So is living with and learning from your childhood memories. So are the great eating places, gay bars, gyms and neighborhoods of Boston. Murder is only a part of their lives. Preparing lavishly described gourmet meals and saying grace before some of them is another part. Accept this passion for background, history, texture and detail. Read the book as Rick Boyer wrote it. If you have to be done with a mystery thriller in two hours or less, you'd best skip YELLOW BIRD. Doc's skill as a dental surgeon is sometimes called upon by the State Police. In the case of a corpse found after lying shot in a rich man's empty home for three weeks in the dead of a Nantucket Sound winter, Doc Adams is asked to autopsy the deceased's face and mouth. He finds that the dead man's earliest dental work was high-class, clearly done in England. And yet the corpse's mouth is a mess of neglected teeth, gums and near starvation. Worse, he had Kaposi's sarcoma, "a
malignant tumor ... a sure sign of advanced AIDS" (Ch 4.)
When a cancer specialist continues the autopsy, he removes the cloth over the upper face (something Doc insists be imposed before he examines a mouth) Charlie Adams has a tremendous shock: he and Mary this this man in Concord four or five years ago. It is (or looks like) George Brenner. When last seen, George was a straight ladies' man. It is not long before the corpse is identified as the homosexual lover of a Jamaican house servant of influential, rich Northrop F. Chesterton. Not only that but three weeks earlier Doc and Mary may have been strolling outside Chesterton's beach home in Osterville and heard the shot that killed their onetime friend. The story is still early on, yet facts are rushing in that implicate Doc and Mary as witnesses, identifiers and increasingly as pawns in a mystery directed by a criminal mastermind. As Joe Brindelli says to Doc, his brother-in-law and very good friend: "'So now it turns out you and Mary know
this guy, for chrissakes. Are we still supposed to believe it's all
coincidence?'
'No,' I said, 'They say that once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, but three times is enemy action. This is the fourth bad penny in a row." (Ch. 6). Mary and Doc had been strolling weeks earlier out on the beach looking out over Nantucket Sound at the suggestion of their host at a nearby open house party. He was ex-Houston doctor Jonathan "Randy" Randolph. Randy had phoned Doc out of the blue for the first time since their medical school days to renew acquaintances. This is not happenstance! Before we know it, Doc, Mary, Joe and Martha are caught up in gang vengeance plotted by high grade ganja/marijuana smugglers from Jamaica. They find clues in a high class gay bar for males in Boston. The two women return to the bar to comfort a young man dying of AIDS. He had been kicked out by his family and had come to a gay neighborhood in Boston to drink himself to death in the company of sympathetic homosexual men. When the two women try to ease his pain, the dying young man tells them to obscenity themselves and leave him be. YELLOW BIRD is full of Boston area backgrounders: -- Joe Brindelli raises pigeons This
initiates a dialog with brother-in-law Doc about how noble Italians in
the middle ages used to capture their enemies' pigeons and hold them
for ransom.
-- Only New England celebrates Patriots Day and the 1775 victory over ever victorious British Recoats by the Americans who fired "the shot heard round the world" at Concord. -- All New England real estate is pricey. But beachfront Osterville, of mystery murder fame, is the priciest. And its wealthy "cottage" owners go to the Bahamas or Jamaica or somewhere else ritzy and far south for the winter. To describe the elaborate plot in detail is to spoil the pleasure of unraveling clues and recognizing red herrings for what they are. 200 years from now cultural anthropologists may still be studying the DOC ADAMS mysteries for one man's take on what made people tick in 1980s and early 1990s America. -OOO- TAGS: kaposi's sarcoma, ks, hiv virus, homosexual behavior, jamaican ganja, osterville, massachusetts, rick boyer http://www.amazon.com/Yellow-Bird-Rick-Boyer/dp/ 0804110360/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid= 1276600792&sr=8-1 =-=-=-=-=-=-=--=-= (5) epinions.com title of review: "They ought to call me the Bells and Whistles Adams" Written: Jun 21 '10 Product Rating: * * * * * Pros: Fiendishly complex plot woven into a fabulously detailed background tapestry. Empathetic treatment of dying homosexuals. Cons: The unraveling of mystery is the main thing. But there are too many backgrounders. The Bottom Line: Don't make Rick Boyer tell his stories your way. His way is detailed, humorous, unrushed, prone to backgrounders, learned asides and excursuses. Homosexuality as mystery. Sip, do not gulp! aohcapablanca's Full Review: Rick Boyer - Yellow Bird Here is a multiple choice question for you: YELLOW BIRD is (1) A detective mystery story? Is it strong on psychology of noticing and on characters' failing to notice clues, red herrings, forming puzzle-unraveling hypotheses and other related mental and memory gyrations? ANSWER: Yes! (2) Is there probing in this nine volume series of the psyche, mores, ethics, religion and lifestyles of Doctor (Doc) Charles Adams, wife Mary Adams, brother in law, Police Lieutenant Joe Brindelli and other recurring participants in the Doc Adams saga? ANSWER: Yes! COMMENT: A master writer like Sir Walter Scott or Graham Greene can leave a memorable impression of a fictional character in a couple of sentences. Author Rick Boyer is more leisurely. He might sketch a one-dimensional Lieutenant Brindelli, to take an example, in one volume. By a later volume, however, e. g., in THE WHALE'S FOOTPRINTS, Doc's brother-in-law Joe is now an overweight two-dimensional tragic widower, ex-Catholic priest, onetime family business entrepreneur, and now a rising star in Massachusetts State police. By YELLOW BIRD (seventh volume in the series) formerly unhappy, long guilt-ridden Joe is remarried, lighter by 37 pounds and, hurrah!, now fully three-dimensional. Do not be in a rush to get to know Rick Boyer's characters. He presents them the natural way that we slowly get to know most people in real life. (3) Are there seemingly endless descriptions of land, water, skies, geography and history, watering holes and restaurants of Greater Boston, including Cape Cod Bay? (And in YELLOW BIRD of coastal South Carolina, too?) ANSWER: Yes! COMMENT: Author Rick Boyer is as much a minute detail master as any great Flemish painter. Would you be proud of yourself if you impatiently flipped through nine paintings by Hieronymus Bosch? No way! You would pull out your magnifying glass and savor every detail. Ditto the nine novels of Doc Adams. Chesterton's FATHER BROWN you can race through. Chesterton is all about pure unraveling of enigmas. Boyer is all about detail, background, character as set in youth. For quick, brain-dead bedside reading, go somewhere else! (4) Is there serious, empathetic presentation of male homosexuality as central to a detective story? ANSWER: Yes! COMMENT: YELLOW BIRD plays out over four months (January - May) of 1989. Most of the action is between Boston and Cape Cod, with allusions to drug trade and characters in Port Antonio, Jamaica. The climax plays out 900 miles south of Boston in coastal South Carolina. The first (of several) murder victims is George Brenner. At novel's beginning Doc Adams and wife Mary are strolling along the beach in Osterville overlooking Nantucket sound. They hear a shot from the second storey of a rich man's empty "cottage." Three weeks later a dead man is found in the virtually unheated house by a servant of influential Massachusetts insider, owner Northrop F. Chesterton. Doc Adams is asked to autopsy the dead man's face and mouth. He recognizes Brenner. At least Doc thinks he does. Four years ago Brenner, before moving away from Concord, George had been the neighbor of Doc and wife Mary. But then he had also been in the flush of good macho health and quite a ladies' man. Now his corpse is nearly starved. His teeth are falling out (though when young they had clearly been given expensive care in England). He had been dying of AIDS from kaposi's sarcoma, which Doc discovers in his mouth and a specialist confirms. Weeks later when the great man Chesterton returns from Jamaica to resume living in his Osterville mansion, another house servant approaches Doc to tell him that the dead man had been his lover! Before Doc can learn more, a drug gang shotguns the servant to death . Meanwhile Doc and brother-in-law police officer Joe visit an upscale gay bar in Boston to show photos of George Brenner. Brenner is recognized; he had drunk there every night for a week; he had said he was living with a friend up the block. Later Adams and Brindellis return to that bar with their wives. The women show great sympathy for a young HIV-positive man at the bar who had been kicked out by his family and is now in Boston to drink himself to death among sympathetic males. The young man rebuffs the women with an obscenity. Remember that rebuff! Towards novel's end, the mastermind behind the original murder tells Doc, who is briefly his prisoner in South Carolina, details of what had happened months earlier and why. The strong overtone is that shooting George Brenner had been an act of mercy. George would have preferred dying that way -- had he been asked. (5) Is this novel a craftsman's display of narrative art? REPLY: Yes! COMMENT: Rick Boyer as an author has been slowly rising in my esteem. Before I tweaked to his leisurely, minutely backgrounded fleshing out of his recurring characters, I had noticed his writing craft. Doc Adams, for instance, is a perfect first-person narrator. We never know a thing more than Doc knows at the time. And Boyer's plots seems as carefully mapped out as anything famously diagrammed by Sinclair Lewis. And the psychology of clue noticing and not noticing! At least a couple of times I caught something as a vital clue days before either Doc or Lieutenant Brindelli or Mary did! Boyer is a deliberate master craftsman. This may not always make for the liveliest writing. But it cannot be missed. (6) Are there digressions, obiter dicta and hard to defend displays of erudition? ANSWER: Alas, Yes! COMMENT: Let me start with an example that may be more detailed than necessary but is prima facie useful in advancing the plot: One of several "decisive" clues in unraveling the murder of George Brenner was Brenner's observed long ago passion for German-language short-wave broadcasts heard on an expensive Grundig radio that Doc Adams remembered seeing and hearing George use. It is not too strong to suggest that Doc covets that radio (which happily Doc is ultimately gifted by George's ex-wife). Erupts a long litany down the well trodden memory lane of narrator Doc Adams just loving and loving that old Grundig, including its "frequency-band selectors, RF gain
controls ... noise blanket switches .. beat frequency oscillators ...
pass-band tuning buttons ... and so on."
"Can't forget them. I love the bells and whistles. Anything that has them, I buy. They ought to call me the Bells and Whistles Adams" (Ch. 8) Less defensible: -- a fair amount of ink spilt over Doc's
brother-in-law Joe's passion for a handful of pigeons he keeps on his
Boston apartment's balcony. Joe tells a barely interested Doc during
freezing weather out among the birds how medieval Italian nobles would
send their pigeons aloft in great numbers to kidnap weaker flocks, then
bring them home to roost, where the new possessors would sell them back
to the other nobles at a high cost. Joe's new wife Martha is giving Joe
until summer to get rid of the few pigeons left. Doc opens their cage
and sends them out into the cold. What is the point? Beats me.
-- We learn of Patriots Day, an annual holiday only in New England, to commemorate the 1775 battle at Concord Bridge, where was fired "the shot heard round the world." What is the point of so much detail, ostensibly irrelevant to unraveling a murder mystery? I can only speculate. One thing that emerges is that murders and the solving of murders occur with notable and improbable frequency in the lives of Doc and Mary Adams. And that couple makes a great amateur team at solving crimes, in the grand manner of those equally fictional creations of Dashiell Hammett -- Thin Man Nick Charles and wife Nora -- long before the Adamses. And just as Nick Charles never passed up a drink while pursuing criminals, so Doc and Mary fit crime solving into their wider lives as spouses, lovers, parents, gourmet cooks and diners, as a long distance runner and karate expert (in Doc's case), as doctor and operating room nurse respectively, and on and on. Murders happen. Happiness and contentment do not. In YELLOW BIRD, Doc, while staking out his prey across from a post office in coastal South Carolina, passes the time reading Joesph Conrad's LORD JIM for the umpteenth time. He has passed over a selecton of Louis L' Amour westerns available in a nearby bookshop in favor of Conrad. But Doc takes time out to analyze for us the strengths (L' Amour knew his history, he could spin a grand yarn) and weaknesses (he was not a great writer) of that author. During the same "stakeout," Doc was not above retelling LORD JIM to a sexy young waitress whose father teaches literature at the University of Virginia. Is Doc a Renaissance man? I don't think so. All Doc's original reading seems to have been in the distant past. He is never shown reading anything fresh in the three novels I have read. The two couples (Adamses and Brintellis) say grace before one of their lavishly produced evening meals. But they are not otherwise religious, including the ex-priest, which strikes me as darn implausible. BOTTOM LINE: Rick Boyer, I predict, will grow on you as an author, as he has on me. But it takes time: more than one book. And for heaven's sake, do not rush him. Any more than you would dash through Hieronymus Bosch paintings. Savor those details. Learn from the excursuses and asides. Stay alert for clues. And you will go far! -OOO- Thank you, dear PESTYSIDE/PATSY, for so quickly making Rick Boyer's YELLOW BIRD reviewable by me for epinions.com! Recommended: Yes http://www1.epinions.com/reviews/Rick_Boyer_Yellow_Bird_epi =-=-=-=-=-=-=--=-= boyer_bird http://www.patrickkillough.com/books/boyer_bird.html |