This thriller relies on a lot of suspense-genre tropes, but it’s richly imagined, and its characters are fun to follow—even...
A heist novel that takes a decidedly surreal turn when its posse of professional burglars enters an ultraviolent underworld.
To most of the people she knows, Kim Sawyer appears to be a fairly normal Englishwoman who’s studious, affable, and gives lectures on art history. Nobody knows that she was once known as Alice or that she was an aspiring art thief. She might have made the big time if her gang hadn’t accidentally murdered one of its marks. Now, her old friend Max has re-emerged to coax her back into the game. The gang’s new ringleader is a mysterious American named Franklin D. Tyler; after he fakes a shooting to test her reaction under pressure, she knows that she can’t trust a word he says. Tyler arranges a heist on a seemingly closed antiques shop, but soon the thieves find themselves descending into a subterranean compound full of trained killers, and they must use their wits and any available weapons to stay alive. This is not a typical con’s-last-job story; instead, Boote’s novel turns into a macabre survivalist fantasy, complete with hand-to-hand combat and hostages burned alive. The story’s English landscape lends itself to witty Cockney dialogue, and the author makes clear the class division between Kim, an astute academic, and Tyler’s henchmen, who speak in rough slang. The nonstop action is sometimes exhausting, and Boote leans heavily on pop-culture references, as when a character is reminded of the films The Sound of Music, Iron Sky, and Outpost in quick succession. However, the author also capably describes his characters’ fear, and reluctant courage, in the face of homicidal maniacs. Most of the novel feels cinematic, and the finale is particularly easy to imagine as an action-movie denouement. Boote also adds some depth to his story by using fine art and mythology to embellish his theme: was Pandora’s box a story of releasing evil into the world, or is it about natural human curiosity? Meanwhile, Kim is torn between the security of her new life and the thrill of breaking the rules.
This thriller relies on a lot of suspense-genre tropes, but it’s richly imagined, and its characters are fun to follow—even into deadly catacombs.Pub Date: May 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1785106651
Page Count: -
Publisher: Dog Ear Publisher
Review Posted Online: April 30, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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