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Summary
Summary
Isabel Allende--the New York Times bestselling author whose books, including Maya's Notebook, Island Beneath the Sea, and Zorro, have sold more than 57 million copies around the world--demonstrates her remarkable literary versatility with Ripper, an atmospheric, fast-paced mystery involving a brilliant teenage sleuth who must unmask a serial killer in San Francisco.
The Jackson women, Indiana and Amanda, have always had each other. Yet, while their bond is strong, mother and daughter are as different as night and day. Indiana, a beautiful holistic healer, is a free-spirited bohemian. Long divorced from Amanda's father, she's reluctant to settle down with either of the men who want her--Alan, the wealthy scion of one of San Francisco's elite families, and Ryan, an enigmatic, scarred former Navy SEAL.
While her mom looks for the good in people, Amanda is fascinated by the dark side of human nature, like her father, the SFPD's Deputy Chief of Homicide. Brilliant and introverted, the MIT-bound high school senior is a natural-born sleuth addicted to crime novels and Ripper, the online mystery game she plays with her beloved grandfather and friends around the world.
When a string of strange murders occurs across the city, Amanda plunges into her own investigation, discovering, before the police do, that the deaths may be connected. But the case becomes all too personal when Indiana suddenly vanishes. Could her mother's disappearance be linked to the serial killer? Now, with her mother's life on the line, the young detective must solve the most complex mystery she's ever faced before it's too late.
Author Notes
Isabel Allende was born in 1942 in Lima, Peru, the daughter of a Chilean diplomat. When her parents separated, young Isabel moved with her mother to Chile, where she spent the rest of her childhood. She married at the age of 19 and had two children, Paula and Nicolas. Her uncle was Salvador Allende, the president of Chile. When he was overthrown in the coup of 1973, she fled Chile, moving to Caracas, Venezuela.
While living in Venezuela, Allende began writing her novels, many of them exploring the close family bonds between women. Her first novel, The House of the Spirits, has been translated into 27 languages, and was later made into a film. She then wrote Of Love and Shadows, Eva Luna, and The Stories of Eva Luna, all set in Latin America. The Infinite Plan was her first novel to take place in the United States. She explores the issues of human rights and the plight of immigrants and refugees in her novel, In The Midst of Winter. In Paula, Allende wrote her memoirs in connection with her daughter's illness and death. She delved into the erotic connections between food and love in Aphrodite: A Memoir of the Senses.
In addition to writing books, Allende has worked as a TV interviewer, magazine writer, school administrator, and a secretary at a U.N. office in Chile. She received the 1996 Harold Washington Literacy Award. She lives in California. Her title Maya's Notebook made The New York Times Best Seller List in 2013.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (2)
New York Review of Books Review
ISABEL ALLENDE Says that RIPPER (Harper, $28.99) is her first murder mystery, and that it was a lot of fun to write. It's probably more accurate to say that this ungainly but thoroughly charming book is the author's own eccentric notion of a murder mystery, and that it's a lot of fun to read. Also, it features a teenage sleuth - "idiosyncratic of appearance, timorous of character, but magnificent of mind," according to her besotted grandfather - who is pretty much irresistible. When Amanda Martin was 13 years old, she was bundled off to a Roman Catholic boarding school run by progressive nuns ("feminists in pants") who taught the girls the proper use of condoms in science class. To supplement her formal schooling, Amanda draws on lessons learned from her divorced mother, a gifted "healer" who practices the curative arts of Reiki, lymphatic drainage and aromatherapy at the Holistic Clinic; her father, a homicide detective on the San Francisco police force; her godmother, "the most famous astrologer in California"; and unofficial guardians like Ryan Miller, a former Navy SEAL, and his "war dog," a brute named Attila. Amanda is a senior in high school and headed for M.I.T. when a security guard at a local elementary school is murdered, the first in a string of gruesome, but seemingly unrelated killings. With the resilience of youth, she seizes on the occasion to rethink the strategy of Ripper, the interactive mystery game she plays online with "a select group of freaks and geeks from around the world." Instead of solving 19th-century crimes in gaslight London, the brainy players - including a paralyzed boy in New Zealand, a Canadian girl with an eating disorder and Amanda's grandfather - will match wits with a real killer. In this breezy translation by Ollie Brock and Frank Wynne, Allende blithely dispenses with the more restrictive genre conventions to get to the fun parts - narrative timeouts in which she lingers on the romantic adventures of Amanda's free-spirited mother, the delectable Indiana Jackson, or stops to construct detailed back stories for colorful secondary characters like Doña Encarnación, Amanda's formidable grandmother, and Danny D'Angelo, a chatty drag queen who waits table at Cafe Rossini. One by one, they take their places on a canvas so crowded with life that even death seems to melt into the background. JOHN STRALEY writes sweet crime novels about sad people, of whom there are plenty in COLD STORAGE, ALASKA (Soho Crime, $26.95), a book that takes its title from a fished-out fishing village in the Far North. "Most of the people in this town are drunks or depressives," according to one resident, "but we have our funny moments." Straley strikes the perfect balance of humor and pathos in this story about the McCahon brothers: Miles, a medical assistant who dispenses care and kindness to just about everyone in this sorry town, and Clive, who comes home from prison with enough drug money sewed into his clothes to open what he calls a "bar slash church." Clive seems content to give up his wild ways and settle down to preach love on Sundays and tend bar the rest of the week. And that's the way things might have gone if Billy Cox hadn't set out to paddle his kayak 800 miles to Seattle to meet the Dalai Lama and Jake Shoemaker hadn't come roaring into town looking for that drug money. But they do, and that means trouble for the hard-luck town that clings to life the way Miles clings to his hope of someday catching a king salmon. OF ALL THE places where Inspector Ian Rutledge's Scotland Yard assignments have taken him, the desolate Fen country must surely be the eeriest, HUNTING SHADOWS (Morrow/HarperCollins, $25.99), the latest book in Charles Todd's excellent historical series set in the aftermath of World War I, finds Rutledge in this watery land of cold and mist when a sniper picks off a guest at a society wedding. A second murder, executed with the same coldblooded precision, takes the life of a Tory politician. Rutledge recognizes the handiwork of an expert marksman and seeks out men who fought in the war. Sensitive to the internalized wounds of these traumatized veterans, he proceeds cautiously, earning the trust of the locals and eventually, if reluctantly, finding his man. THERE'S NO LITERARY law prohibiting genre authors from inventing personal lives for the cops in a police procedural. But there ought to be some kind of restraining order to keep them from letting hero worship get out of hand. The German crime writer Nele Neuhaus shows no such restraint in Steven T. Murray's translation Of BAD WOLF (Minotaur, $25.99), in which a vile case of child abuse is squeezed into a far more elaborate narrative about the Frankfurt homicide detectives investigating the crimes. Detective Superintendent Pia Kirchhoff and Inspector Oliver von Bodenstein seem like competent officers, but it's a miracle they're able to put in a day's work, considering the time they spend handling their domestic affairs, which encompass not only their past and current spouses and potential lovers but their bratty kids and troubled stepchildren, their equally busy friends (the pregnant ones, especially) and all the professional enemies who are (perhaps understandably) out to get them.
Library Journal Review
In Allende's (Maya's Notebook) latest work, "Ripper" is an online interactive crime-solving game. High school senior Amanda Jackson uses the platform to solve a series of serial killings in the San Francisco area, believing the murders are related. However, the game becomes all too real when Amanda's mother, Indiana, is abducted by the killer. The story is driven more by character than plot as it examines the complex web of relationships involving the Jackson women. The city of San Francisco serves as much as a character here as do the human protagonists. While the story moves along at a rapid pace, at times the listener can be overwhelmed with keeping track of the vast number of characters. Reader Edoardo Ballerini, however, does an excellent job presenting the story. VERDICT Young adult listeners and fans of stories set in San Francisco will enjoy this audiobook. ["Appealing characters, a fast-paced plot, and a successfully imagined killer add up to great entertainment," read the review of the Harper hc, LJ 11/15/13.]-Stephen L. Hupp, West Virginia Univ. Parkersburg Lib. (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
