A nail-biting first novel in which a rogue FBI agent, armed to the byte with cutting-edge computer weaponry, goes up against a clutch of equally well-heeled serial killers. Special Agent Jay Fletcher's pride and joy is her Criminal Behaviors Index (C-Bix), a program she's developed to flush probable serial killers out of innocent databases. C-Bix is swift, effective, and illegal, and when Jay uses it to get the goods on a serial killer of flight attendants, she ends up banished to Santa Fe as a consultant to Lt. J.M. Cruz, a fire investigator working a series of arson blazes. It's no sweat for a hacker like Jay to pick the well-hidden firebug out of a likely list of suspectsbut not before she's accidentally stumbled onto the trail of a serial killer nicknamed Hand Job for his trademark mutilationsand, through a memorable confrontation with Hand Job, onto Special K, a computerized network whose membership consists entirely of serial killers, refereed by a sysop who calls himself the Wizard. The temptation to log onto the system is irresistible, and Jay takes her vacation time to track Special K subscribers in Chicago and Slippery Rock, Pennsylvania, before going up against the Wizard himself. Meanwhile, back at the legitimate FBI, Jay's boss has called on William Hawkins to help him track the Iceman, still another psychopath who enlivened the years before Hawkins's retirement from the Agency with a series of taunting letters. Inevitably, Hawkins finds himself closing in on Jay as well as on his quarry; and, just as inevitably, the Iceman gets wind of the Agency typesone retired, one outlawwho are on his trail. So what if newcomer Holt, like maverick Jay, ends up going over the top, dishing vigilante pleasures with both hands. From the opening grabber, this story is a model of plotting so dazzling it makes most other page-turners look positively anemic. (First printing of 110,000; Literary Guild/Mystery Guild featured alternate)
Pub Date: Oct. 10, 1995
ISBN: 0-312-13614-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1995
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
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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