An enticing villain, loads of action and a dash of Southern flair make for a great read.
In Leaphart’s debut novel, an avid environmentalist, his chauffeur/bodyguard and others fight to bring down a company that’s dumping mercury into Georgia waters.
A chemist at Trans-Atlantic Chemical Company was killed trying to deliver an envelope to Alex Bosche; is a coverup underway? Alex; his employee and friend, Elijah; a detective; and the dead man’s widow risk a daring infiltration of TRACCO’s plant in search of enough evidence to prove that the company is polluting Glynn County’s Turtle River with mercury-infused waste. But TRACCO has hired its own people to ensure that witnesses to any transgressions aren’t alive to tell their story. Leaphart’s book begins as a mystery: two men cryptically discuss a dead chemist, a desired envelope and the enigmatic “Shooter.” But after questions surrounding the murder are quickly answered, the novel becomes a story about exposing a larger crime: mercury’s deadly effects on marine wildlife, as well as on humans. The author instills his novel with sturdy components that help maintain a solid pace—Morris, the Shooter, is a formidable foe who won’t go down easily; copious amounts of action fire up the plot, including gunfights, fending off a helicopter attack and battling a storm at sea; and a surprise ending leaves some characters in unexpected circumstances. Alex and company spend much of their time on a boat—often being pursued—which allows detailed descriptions of sailing that, like Alex’s occasional tirade on nature or the harms that befall nature, can be a bit excessive. But such excessiveness works well for droll prayers—a priest blesses beer and pizza and prays that the killer is killed—and seafood descriptions, especially the loving depictions of Southern cuisine. Some readers may be offended by repeated racial slurs—often in reference to Alex, who’s Cuban, and Elijah, who’s black—as well as the socially disdained word for mentally challenged children, the result here of mercury poisoning. Not that Leaphart underplays the connotation of these words: The slurs are spoken by insolent characters, and the other word (“retard”) is usually uttered during emotionally heightened dialogue.
An enticing villain, loads of action and a dash of Southern flair make for a great read.Pub Date: Dec. 15, 2012
ISBN: 978-1479182176
Page Count: 210
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: March 20, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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