An entertaining and distinctive revenge tale.
In this debut action-thriller, a man’s ferocious search for his wife’s killer incites someone’s retaliation, putting him in grave danger.
When John Avery Malaki catches his wife, Elizabeth, in bed with his best friend, Bill, he demands they both leave the house. But the bad news keeps coming: A few days later, cops inform John that Elizabeth is dead from an apparent suicide. He’s skeptical, and the evidence agrees, eventually designating the death as murder and John as the prime suspect. But a taunting voice on his answering machine takes credit for Elizabeth’s homicide and suggests John lay low. He doesn’t comply and soon finds himself framed for another murder. John then goes on the offensive, turning the tables on and demanding answers from people suddenly trying to kill him. Using combat skills (the origins of which are unclear), he tracks down others who can direct him to Elizabeth’s murderer, with occasional help from a secret ally. It seems an organization with the acronym SOTE wants John dead, believing he’s learned too much during his corpse-riddled hunt for a killer. With both sides determined to mete out rage-fueled vengeance, the body count is bound to rise exponentially before it’s all over. Eaton’s book is rife with explicit sex scenes and violence. The sex is provocative, especially with consenting participants, but the action can be downright sadistic and lingers on the gory parts. There’s mystery as well, including murky backstories for John and Elizabeth. Though one twist is revealed early (perspective from a revenge-minded individual in SOTE), there are additional surprises, from shocking deaths to the identity of the person aiding John. The enjoyable story is unfortunately diluted by excessive blunders: misspellings (“Chlorophorm”), grammatical and punctuation errors (“Some was from both our families”; “My brothers other vehicle”), and alternating past/present tense throughout. An editor’s eye would be valuable, as beyond those mistakes lies writing that’s comical (Elizabeth’s suicide raises a “shit load of red flags”) and razor-sharp (“My anger quickly subsided, and shame walked in”).
An entertaining and distinctive revenge tale.Pub Date: Dec. 22, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5462-2154-8
Page Count: 144
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: Feb. 21, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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