A crisply written, well-researched, and thoroughly entertaining romance/thriller/mystery.
In this crime-fiction sequel, legendary criminals Bonnie and Clyde go undercover to prevent a landmark dam from being blown up before it’s completed.
In their previous novel in this series, Hays and McFall (Bonnie and Clyde: Resurrection Road, 2017, etc.) presented an alternative-history scenario: What if the U.S government faked the outlaws’ 1934 deaths and recruited the duo as uniquely talented operatives? Now their handler, Sal, has a new assignment for them. Two murders, and further evidence, suggest that someone is trying to sabotage what will become the Hoover Dam (still called the “Boulder Dam” in 1935). Likely suspects include union members, anarchists, or mobsters, for different reasons, but whoever’s responsible, Sal says, “the dam has to hold.” Assuming the aliases of Brenda and Clarence Prentiss, Bonnie and Clyde go undercover and get jobs—she as a secretary in the dam’s hiring office and he as a water-truck driver. Nothing about this task is harder for them than working for a living; in a running joke, Clyde destroys his alarm clock every morning by throwing it across the room. Hot on the trail of the culprits (and hot for each other), the two dodge lawmen, operatives from Murder Inc., and other dangers. Just as importantly, their consciences grow a few sizes, too. As in Resurrection Road, Hays and McFall evoke time and place well, as in their descriptions of the dam’s brand-new yet scruffy company town: “nearly identical cottages lined up like a battalion of weary desert soldiers, each standing at shabby attention over a tiny front yard of gravel and a few cactus plants.” Though set in the past, the story’s politics are fresh and timely; Jimmy Hall, a union organizer, notes that “We got some things to work through still, like making sure we’re inclusive of all folks and not just white folks, and not just men.” The word “inclusive” feels a bit too modern, but the sentiments are evergreen. Readers will find Bonnie and Clyde to be great company, and the novel’s framing story (the widowed Bonnie’s 1984 recollections) gives their relationship an extra layer of poignancy.
A crisply written, well-researched, and thoroughly entertaining romance/thriller/mystery.Pub Date: March 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9974113-6-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Pumpjack Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 6, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
Once again, Hilderbrand displays her gift for making us care most about her least likable characters.
Hilderbrand’s latest cautionary tale exposes the toxic—and hilarious—impact of gossip on even the most sophisticated of islands.
Eddie and Grace Pancik are known for their beautiful Nantucket home and grounds, financed with the profits from Eddie’s thriving real estate company (thriving before the crash of 2008, that is). Grace raises pedigreed hens and, with the help of hunky landscape architect Benton Coe, has achieved a lush paradise of fowl-friendly foliage. The Panciks’ teenage girls, Allegra and Hope, suffer invidious comparisons of their looks and sex appeal, although they're identical twins. The Panciks’ friends the Llewellyns (Madeline, a blocked novelist, and her airline-pilot husband, Trevor) invested $50,000, the lion’s share of Madeline’s last advance, in Eddie’s latest development. But Madeline, hard-pressed to come up with catalog copy, much less a new novel, is living in increasingly straightened circumstances, at least by Nantucket standards: she can only afford $2,000 per month on the apartment she rents in desperate hope that “a room of her own” will prime the creative pump. Construction on Eddie’s spec houses has stalled, thanks to the aforementioned crash. Grace, who has been nursing a crush on Benton for some time, gives in and a torrid affair ensues, which she ill-advisedly confides to Madeline after too many glasses of Screaming Eagle. With her agent and publisher dropping dire hints about clawing back her advance and Eddie “temporarily” unable to return the 50K, what’s a writer to do but to appropriate Grace’s adultery as fictional fodder? When Eddie is seen entering her apartment (to ask why she rented from a rival realtor), rumors spread about him and Madeline, and after the rival realtor sneaks a look at Madeline’s rough draft (which New York is hotly anticipating as “the Playboy Channel meets HGTV”), the island threatens to implode with prurient snark. No one is spared, not even Hilderbrand herself, “that other Nantucket novelist,” nor this magazine, “the notoriously cranky Kirkus.”
Once again, Hilderbrand displays her gift for making us care most about her least likable characters.Pub Date: June 16, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-316-33452-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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