“Real life ain’t an Agatha Christie novel,” Miles sagely tells Charley after the final bell. And this case, which saves all...
Legal eagle Coughlin (The Judgment, 1997, etc.) has been dead nearly ten years, but his best-loved creation, alcoholic defense attorney Charley Sloan, lives on courtesy of Sorrells (Power of Attorney, not reviewed, etc.) in this undernourished courtroom drama.
You have to wonder about a client who phones you past three in the morning, ahead of the police, to say that he’s just found his wife dead in their bedroom, and Charley does wonder about hard-boiled novelist Miles Dane, a former bestseller who’d returned from New York to buy into the most exclusive neighborhood in his Michigan hometown of Pickeral Point before his flagging sales had made him ever more pressed for cash—until the slaying of his wife Diana, whom he has thousands of motives to murder. Charley’s suspicions don’t abate when Miles starts his first chat with Detective Chantall Denkenberg by revising the story he told Charley. And when another of Charley’s clients, the even more raffish landscaping thief Leon James Prouty, spins a tale of a suspicious car outside the Dane domain on the murder night and Miles reacts by shutting down, both Charley and his daughter Lisa—another alcoholic who’s fled her last year at Columbia Law to help out the father she barely knows—figure they’ve got their work cut out for them. The crucial break comes when they realize Miles is covering up for somebody, but since it’s a somebody he won’t identify and they can’t subpoena, they’re forced to go to trial with nothing but reasonable doubt, as a hostile judge lands punch after punch to Charley’s head in preparation for the inevitable 15th-round knockout.
“Real life ain’t an Agatha Christie novel,” Miles sagely tells Charley after the final bell. And this case, which saves all its surprises and reversals for the very last minute, is more like a well-known Christie short story, first published in, say, 1949.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2002
ISBN: 0-312-28066-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2002
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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