Collins clearly wants to be Mickey Spillane, and there’s plenty of blazing .45 action to satisfy lovers of that sort of...
The Angel of Death is dead, but his spirit of vengeance lives on in his war-hero son, back to get revenge on the Chicago Outfit—again.
We’re now in the middle stretch of the trilogy that Collins spun out of his 1998 graphic novel, Road to Perdition (dourly filmed four years later by Sam Mendes, with Tom Hanks and Paul Newman), then wrote into a novelization. With this sequel (to be concluded, we’re told, with Road to Paradise), Collins extends the story of the O’Sullivan clan, previously decimated by mob warfare and now represented only by Michael O’Sullivan, adopted and given the last name Satariano, and still remembering what Capone’s henchmen did to his family. Michael grew up to be just as much a stone-cold killer as his old man, as proven in the story’s bloody introduction, set on Bataan, where Michael guns down a division’s worth of Japanese soldiers. He loses an eye but gains a Medal of Honor and honorable discharge back to the states, where he doesn’t lose any time getting into the mix. Papa Satariano gets him a meeting with Capone’s right-hand man, Frank Nitti, who welcomes the very useful Michael into the belly of the Outfit. Simultaneously, Michael is supposed to be doing his civic duty, as laid out for him during a meeting with Eliot Ness—star of a series of pulp novels that Collins wrote some years ago—who wants help breaking up the Outfit led by Capone from his Florida mansion. A long flashback fills in background on Michael’s family origins back in Rock Island, and it’s a pleasant relief from Collins’s tiresome way, elsewhere, of imagining Michael as a rock-jawed, two-dimensional caricature.
Collins clearly wants to be Mickey Spillane, and there’s plenty of blazing .45 action to satisfy lovers of that sort of thing. But without the robotic Michael possessing a single human emotion, it’s hard to care much what happens.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-06-054027-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2004
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
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
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