The corporate downscaler as serial killeran appealing conceit given long, lumpy, lifeless treatment in the pseudonymous Barrow's debut. Michael Woodrow is a flawlessly handsome management consultant based in Chicago who jets all over the country telling ailing businesses how to cut their costs by firing people. Michael also does some more literal cutting himself, savagely murdering a series of 40-ish women who come on to him in Florida, in Michigan, in San Antonio. Michael's obviously never been able to come to terms with his father's murder of his faithless wifea crime for which Norman Woodrow, who promised Michael he wouldn't abandon him, did 18 years in stir. Now Michael's being tracked on behalf of his Florida victim by ``researcher'' Victor Flam, who's such a bulldog that he keeps on coming even when the victim's mother pulls him off the case. Norman's new neighbor, Lizabeth Seaver, a schoolteacher of 35, is clearly cast as Michael's good angel, but will Michael be able to seize the redemption she offers before cheesy, bullying Flam closes in on him? It's a good question, but Barrow drains the juice from his story by reducing his weakly imagined supporting cast to walk-ons, simplifying angelic Lizabeth and demonic Flam within an inch of their lives, and cocooning Michael and his father in reams of dim, gratuitous flashbacks filling in every conceivable blank in their motivation (there's even time for Norman's retrospective salute to Burt Lancaster's '50s films). Barrow eschews the usual pulpish pleasures of the psycho-killer genre for psychological depth; but instead of coming off as complex, tortured souls, Michael and his father end up, via all this background info, as tiresome veterans condemned to swapping the same old war stories forever. Barrow's quite original keynote for this unthrilling thriller is tristesse. But readers who breathe all this dead air are likely to be the saddest folks of all.
Pub Date: Sept. 21, 1995
ISBN: 0-525-94047-2
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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