The rollicking, roundly suspenseful misadventures of a case of stolen gold coins—an impressive move up to the Elmore Leonard-George V. Higgins neighborhood for the author of The Vespers Tapes (1991). When pint-size thief Benny Bean breaks into a South Jersey house he visited once before, together with a girl who inadvertently showed him how to circumvent the alarm, he can't know how many surprises his routine heist will lead to. Surprise #1: he finds a box of gold coins worth $30,000. Surprise #2: as he's leaving, he's held up by a second thief, a Henry Lawrence who gets away with the coins. Benny digs up Lawrence back in Philly, but comes up against #3: Lawrence insists somebody else stole them from him on his way to meet Benny. Benny promptly kidnaps Lawrence's daughter Claire, who (#4) turns out to be the girl from the house, in order to motivate Lawrence to come up with the gold, but discovers (#5) that the coins have somehow found their way into the possession of Benny's gangland boss, loan shark Freddie Whale. Looks like Benny has kidnapped Claire for nothing—except that, meanwhile, he's run into Paul Fante, who's sweet on the girl. So he pushes Paul to come up with the coins, still unaware that Claire's stepfather, the person both Benny and Lawrence went to rob, was (#6) Victor Notte, blood brother of Whale's own boss Ernie Maglio. As Claire fights to escape, and Paul—still shaken from an earlier brush with Whale—teams up with his mob-connected Uncle Rick to get her back, and Benny runs around waving his piece at anybody who looks like they have a line on his gold—well, why give away the next half-dozen surprises? DiBartolomeo impresses whether he's tugging at your heartstrings on behalf of Paul and Claire or making you laugh heartlessly at the casual killing of a mob wife who steps into the wrong room. A delight from the starting-gate felony to the final payoff.
Pub Date: March 24, 1993
ISBN: 0-312-09058-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1993
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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