Enjoyable more as an intriguing drama than a procedural page-turner.
In Eldon’s debut mystery, a husband returns from his morning jog to find his wife missing, but the authorities aren’t ready to pronounce him innocent.
When distraught Jack Turner turns to the police for help finding his wife, Detective Marty Lufkin finds something devious in the man’s account; he’s determined to prove that Jack wanted his wife gone. However, Marty’s partner, Ryan Sullivan, isn’t convinced, and he spots a possible connection to another suspect. The two cops work their case from separate ends, while Jack tries to keep the police from digging into his past. The lives of the detectives are the heart of Eldon’s book. Marty, in particular, spends more time brooding than examining case details or questioning people. He becomes disillusioned with his job while coming to terms with his divorce and a cop friend’s suicide. Yet, it’s the book’s behind-the-scenes approach that makes for a great read. Sequences like a closeted gay detective who wants to come out to his partner prove more engrossing than the case itself, which often takes a backseat. The investigation unfolds slowly and only shines when various pieces start fitting together: a man fleeing a routine stop; a young boy hit by a bicyclist, etc. Sporadic passages featuring an unidentified, bloody woman in pain and her sexually explicit encounters with an unnamed man help preserve the mystery of Jack’s missing wife. Meanwhile, Jack’s ambivalent behavior, such as telling no one at work that his wife is gone, will keep readers guessing. Eldon fuels the story with pointed dialogue that rings true to its speakers, which is fortunate, since the majority of the novel consists of characters conversing. One inspired bit has Marty and Ryan on separate phone calls that, for a brief moment, sound as if the two men are speaking to one another.
Enjoyable more as an intriguing drama than a procedural page-turner.Pub Date: July 9, 2009
ISBN: 978-0578025131
Page Count: 206
Publisher: Alpha Dog Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 3, 2012
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
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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