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Book Summary and Reviews of Celine by Peter Heller

Celine by Peter Heller

Celine

by Peter Heller

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  • Mar 2017, 352 pages
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About this book

Book Summary

From the best-selling author of The Dog Stars and The Painter, a luminous, masterful novel of suspense - the story of Celine, an elegant, aristocratic private eye who specializes in reuniting families, trying to make amends for a loss in her own past.

Working out of her jewel box of an apartment at the base of the Brooklyn Bridge, Celine has made a career of tracking down missing persons, and she has a better record at it than the FBI. But when a young woman, Gabriela, asks for her help, a world of mystery and sorrow opens up. Gabriela's father was a photographer who went missing on the border of Montana and Wyoming. He was assumed to have died from a grizzly mauling, but his body was never found. Now, as Celine and her partner head to Yellowstone National Park, investigating a trail gone cold, it becomes clear that they are being followed - that this is a case someone desperately wants to keep closed. Combining the exquisite plotting and gorgeous evocation of nature that have become his hallmark, with a wildly engrossing story of family, privilege, and childhood loss, Peter Heller gives us his finest work to date.

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Reviews

Media Reviews

"Starred Review. [Heller] blends suspense with beautiful descriptive writing of both nature and civilization to create a winner." - Library Journal

"An imperfect but largely satisfying detective novel anchored by a charming and unforgettable heroine." - Kirkus

"Despite its intriguing premise, Heller's (The Dog Stars) third novel is a missing persons mystery that never quite finds its mark." - Publishers Weekly

This information about Celine was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.

Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.

Reader Reviews

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M. Kassapa

Celine
Ostensibly it is a search for a missing person who has been pronounced dead, more, it is about family. The characters, Celine, her family, and the client trying to find her father, amazingly interesting, particularly Celine. We could call that the plot. The way it's written, the nuance of both what is said and what is not said totally captures me. It ended when it needed to, but I could have hung out a little longer.

Joan

Entrancing female protagonist
Celine herself is really the subject of this book, even though it purports to be a detective story. If you read it as a detective novel, you'll find the breaks in the story, which fill in the details and background of Celine's life, distracting. But there are reasons to empathize with Celine, who is older and in poor health and clearly a survivor, a woman in a man's world of crime detection and outdoorsmanship. The details of the settings, especially those in the isolated West of mountain dangers and inclement weather, paint pictures that place the reader in the center of the action. Themes of family life explore both pain and pleasure, from childhood to middle adults and to the elderly. Memories are conjured of one's own family strengths and failures.

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Author Information

Peter Heller Author Biography

Peter Heller is the national best-selling author of The River, Celine, The Painter, and The Dog Stars. The Painter was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and won the prestigious Reading the West Book Award, and The Dog Stars has been published in twenty-two languages to date. Heller is also the author of four nonfiction books, including Kook: What Surfing Taught Me About Love, Life, and Catching the Perfect Wave, which was awarded the National Outdoor Book Award for Literature. He holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop in poetry and fiction and lives in Denver, Colorado.

Link to Peter Heller's Website

Other books by Peter Heller at BookBrowse
  • The River jacket
  • The Painter jacket

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