Little Hands Clapping

Publishers Weekly

Rhodes's latest goofy, grim caper (after Anthropology) concerns the dark after-hours shenanigans of a German suicide museum. The curator and an emotionally troubled doctor have a convenient system of disposing of the dead bodies they find after closing hours. The sour elderly curator, a former government linguistics expert who reads foreign dictionaries to fall asleep, cleans up the death scene before the cheerful, insufferably garrulous maid can find the body. Doctor Fröhlicher, summoned at dawn, then bundles the corpse and takes it back to his house, where he will freeze it and eat it piece by piece with his loyal dog Hans. Eating human flesh assuages the Doctor's longing for his dead wife, Ute, a beautiful, seductive harridan. Meanwhile, speeding to the suicide museum is a lovelorn maiden from a small Portuguese village, Madalena, who is heartbroken because her incomparably beautiful childhood sweetheart, Mauro, has been lured away to become a model in the big city. Adding to this tangled plot are the museum's well-intentioned proprietress, keen to increase visitor numbers, and her husband, who looks remarkably like the tenor Pavarotti. Nimble, wry, mischievous Rhodes takes great pains to flesh out these understated, hapless characters, which renders the chasm of their grisly acts rather mild and unremarkable. (Sept.)