An engaging tale about a banker’s struggles to solve a family mystery.
A debut novel revolves around one man’s attempts to uncover the circumstances surrounding his father’s murder in a violence-torn Third World country.
Like some strange adult fairy tale, Verheul’s book takes place in an unnamed tropical country filled with such mythical-sounding municipalities as City by the Water. It is a land peopled by characters like Captain Christmas, V6, Skipper Boutique, and Colonel Neptune. When Johan’s banker son, Oliver, first arrives, he finds everyone to be friendly and helpful; they seem genuinely sad about his father’s death. But as time passes, Oliver realizes that they all have their own motives; everyone wants money from him; and no one can or wants to really explain what happened. Lost in the exigencies of protocol, politics, and public relations, Oliver tries to follow the money trail. He learns his father had an unusually large amount of money in the bank. He discovers that Johan was the lead man on the Disarmament and Stabilization Program, a scheme to trade farm implements and other domestic items to the terrorist followers of Christmas in exchange for turning in their guns. Oliver also flirts with a woman who may or may not have been involved romantically with his father. Meanwhile in the U.S., Davey, an unemployed gun fanatic, learns about the DSP. Convinced this is a plot to take away everyone’s guns, Davey heads to the unnamed country on the dime of a barroom of fellow gun enthusiasts to convince Christmas he should keep his weapons. In this story that is part mystery, part thriller, and part introspective examination of personal values, Verheul has a real eye for how money and corruption affect the day-to-day life in a Third World nation. The author establishes believable characters, humor, and pathos in his well-paced tale through concise and efficient writing (“Christmas often wondered how the army had never been able to find them. They had tried, though. They flew helicopters over the forest—that is, if they could pay for fuel—and sent out patrols to find their base. But the forest had become their ally”). Verheul also manages to bring the distinctive cast of characters to several individual and credible epiphanies. This lively and enjoyable read should appeal to those who prefer their action thrillers with a literary twist and those who take theirs neat.
An engaging tale about a banker’s struggles to solve a family mystery.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-0-692-04769-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Dec. 15, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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
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