tawdriness

In reality, it’s a bit of a down-the-middle thriller that flirts with tawdriness as it presents the inner workings of the highly secretive Vatican.

We’ve been conditioned to expect something specific from memoirs by children of notable people: escape narratives that reveal the tawdriness or tyranny behind the parent’s publicly charming facade and chart the child’s quest for individuality.

No doubt some of its tawdriness was dragged along in the wake of the hotel’s guests and residents, who could enter through a door in the lobby.

Cut through a thin layer of tawdriness and cheap tinsel that may be on its surface, and you discover that a circus can exist only thanks to absolute trust.

McGarrahan’s story renders the tawdriness and banality of crime, the frustrating limits of witnesses and evidence, the hazy frontier between truth and lies, the slipperiness of culpability.