Close to a Killer

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Anxious to start a new life after serving a 15-year prison sentence, Barrie's mother opens a beauty parlor with some of her ex-con friends, all of whom have done time for killing. Business booms at Killer Looks until the husband of a client and then another customer are brutally slain in their fashionable homes. Is one of the employees responsible for the crimes? While the police piece together clues, Barrie and her mother are terrorized by an angry citizen (or is it the real killer?). Their house is vandalized. Their shop is burned and Barrie has the feeling she is being stalked. Less taut and cohesive than Qualey's Thin Ice, this whodunit is too cluttered with peripheral social issues. Barrie's relationships with "lost souls" (former street people), shelter residents and an elderly couple who run a failing used bookstore are too conspicuously worked into the plot, dividing the novel's focus and diffusing its suspense. The heroine's feelings toward her "killer" mother are ambiguous at best ("Not that Barrie had ever decided if her mother was, technically speaking, a murderer"). Most of the time, Barrie seems quite comfortable--almost chummy--with her mother, but she periodically expresses deep resentment at being dragged away from her father and stepmother (who are spending the year in France). As in the author's previous novels, outward appearances are deceiving, but this time around, the final unveiling of truth is a letdown.

KLIATT

To quote from the review of the hardcover in KLIATT, Jan. 1999: Killer Looks is the beauty salon Barrie's mother Daria operates—those who work there are Daria's friends from prison, all guilty of murder or manslaughter. Barrie was only five when her mother was demonstrating against a nuclear power plant; a bomb intended to block a gate went off too early and a guard was killed—Daria went to prison for years. Barrie's father and stepmother raised her in suburban comfort while Daria was away, but now Barrie is living on the edge of poverty with her mom, attending a different high school, and trying to make some sense out of her mother's life and her own. Into this story about killers comes a series of murders, and each victim is somehow connected with Killer Looks Salon. Daria and Barrie are stalked, their home trashed, the salon burned. The People's Center (a local half-way house, community center), Barrie's favorite bookstore, POMP (Parents of Murdered People), and the police force cough up all the other characters in this intriguing mystery, which baffles the reader until the end. Daria and Barrie are especially enigmatic, unusual characters—a change from other mother-daughter combos in YA novels. I especially like the way Qualey arranges to have her characters thoughtfully consider life and death, responsibility, guilt, forgiveness and all the other BIG issues. KLIATT Codes: JS*—Exceptional book, recommended for junior and senior high school students. 1999, Random House/Dell/Laurel-Leaf, 182p, 18cm, $4.99. Ages 13 to 18. Reviewer: Claire Rosser; November 2000 (Vol. 34 No. 6)

VOYA - Mary Ann Capan

Sixteen-year-old Barrie Dupre works part-time at her mother's hair salon, Killer Looks, when she is not attending school, visiting the local used book store, or creating stories based upon vintage photographs. When two people from the affluent suburbs are murdered, many in the community suspect the salon employees-all of whom are convicted killers, including Barrie's mother. Soon after, the Dupre home is trashed and burglarized and then the salon is torched. Are these events somehow connected to the murders, or is it community retaliation? Barrie, who has always found solace at the bookstore, returns once again and it is there that the missing puzzle piece literally falls into her lap.

This taut page-turner is successful both as a mystery and a novel. The fact that the protagonist is not actively seeking to solve the mystery adds another dimension to the book. Qualey, an established, superior writer of young adult realistic fiction, forged into the mystery genre with Thin Ice (Delacorte, 1997/VOYA October 1997). For mystery fans who have gone beyond Joan Lowery Nixon's award-winning books, recommend Qualey.

VOYA Codes: 4Q 5P M J S (Better than most, marred only by occasional lapses, Every YA (who reads) was dying to read it yesterday, Middle School-defined as grades 6 to 8, Junior High-defined as grades 7 to 9 and Senior High-defined as grades 10 to 12).

School Library Journal

Gr 6-10-Barrie Dupre, raised in the suburbs by her father and stepmother, must now spend her junior year of high school in the heart of the city with her mother, an ex-con. Daria Dupre, imprisoned for manslaughter when Barrie was five-years-old, is now the owner-operator of Killer Looks, a successful beauty salon staffed entirely by women who, one way or another, have killed someone. When two of the salon's clients are murdered in their homes, Barrie is caught up in a plot that keeps bringing her even closer to a killer. The path that leads the teen to the murderer is convoluted and the revelation of the truth smacks more of a deus ex machina than the logical end of a carefully crafted plot. However, this book is difficult to put down because of the author's deft hand with dialogue and wry way with characterization. A combination of sophisticate, smart-aleck, and innocent, Barrie collects 1950s career romances and old photographs, writing imaginative but morose stories about the people in the pictures. Every character in the book, particularly Barrie, rings true. Qualey has delivered another successful YA novel.-Jane Halsall, McHenry Public Library District, IL

Kirkus Reviews

A secondhand bookstore and a beauty salon staffed by ex-cons are the poles around which this taut whodunit spins.