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Kiss of Salvation

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In Taylor’s (Our Southern Home, 2011) crime novel set in the late 1940s, a serial killer in Birmingham, Alabama, targets African-American prostitutes, and a detective with a sense of social justice intends to stop him.
Homicide detective Joe McGrath is on his way to Sunday morning Mass when he gets a call from headquarters saying the body of a “colored” woman has been found behind a local hotel. Her partially clothed, strangled corpse is posed at an odd angle and her lips are bruised—odd characteristics that make McGrath wary. Police soon learn the woman was a prostitute, and when a second woman is strangled exactly one month later, her body again posed, McGrath fears that the town may have a psychopath on the loose. Police find 19-year-old Luke Matthew’s wallet near the latest victim, and a racist police chief is quick to pin the murder on the African-American youth. McGrath and his partner interview the teenager, however, and don’t believe he’s guilty of anything but paying for sex. Nonetheless, some other cops beat Matthew until he signs a confession. Case closed? Not when McGrath’s on the case with his new teammate, African-American private eye Sam Rucker. Although both McGrath and Rucker are admirable, especially for their progressive views about race, Taylor wisely chooses not to make his characters saints. McGrath is separated from his wife and daughter, and Rucker won’t commit to his longtime girlfriend and cheats on her. Taylor’s dialogue is terrific, with lots of swift back-and-forth that speeds the story along. That said, some readers may be annoyed by the African-American dialect (“Yes suh. She work for some white lady what lives in Southside”). Also, at one point, Taylor tries to connect the prostitutes’ bruised lips to a “Kiss of Salvation” mentioned in Scripture (Luke 7:37-38), but he doesn’t fully explain the passage, and its meaning remains unclear. The book also might have benefited from a stronger edit to catch typos and punctuation errors, but a little fine-tuning would make it top-notch. This book is a page-turner, and when the investigators finally close in on the killer, it’s impossible to set the novel down.

Fast-paced detective fiction with a 1940s flair.

Pub Date: Aug. 10, 2014

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: 352

Publisher: McCaa Books

Review Posted Online: July 27, 2014

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DEVOLUTION

A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.

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Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).

A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.

A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.

Pub Date: June 16, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine

Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020

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A LITTLE LIFE

The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.

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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

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