Detective fiction that’s packed with genuinely likable characters who join forces in surprising ways.
An inexperienced detective battles evil politicians, corrupt cops, and ruthless gangsters in this light look at the dark side of sunny California.
There’s adventure ahead in Kelly’s (Winged, 2011) detective novel as she introduces the charming Richard Valentine, a novice detective who’s just clueless enough to encourage readers to solve cases along with him. As the novel opens, he’s working small cases in the greater Los Angeles area. He learned the trade as an apprentice to the formidable Dako Farona, an experienced detective involved in dangerous, hush-hush cases. He tosses smaller fish to Valentine, with his receptionist, Laurel Briley, assisting. A few weeks after setting up his own practice, following an initially disastrous bodyguard gig at a Renaissance faire, Valentine lucks out by receiving a cash reward and rents his own office in a two-story building nicknamed the Gingerbread House. He shares it with a motley crew of LA entrepreneurs, including would-be screenwriters; Moonbeam Fink, a masseuse; a music producer; a talent agent; and hapless actor Lloyd, the building’s receptionist. He’s encouraged by Kitty and Bitsy Sutterman, his elderly landladies, who quickly disabuse him of his prejudices about senior citizens with “all the gentle finesse of Darth Vader chopping off Luke Skywalker’s hand.” They make him see that “growing old may be inevitable, but growing up is a choice.” Kelly tosses in Dako’s feisty, beautiful daughter Rexanne, the seventh-richest 20-year-old in Texas, a beautiful woman named Piper Lang, hints about the past from former cop Victor Ramirez, and assorted corrupt local officials and mobsters to keep Valentine’s head spinning. The wonderfully easy first-person voice seems drawn from the golden age of detective stories (“I creaked along behind her, sweating like an armadillo on a grill”).The author plays fair with the mystery elements, weaving clues into the engaging central story via smoothly blended storylines. Murder, greed, and betrayal remain constants throughout, making this trip through the Hollywood Hills an example of first-rate escapist reading.
Detective fiction that’s packed with genuinely likable characters who join forces in surprising ways.Pub Date: Aug. 16, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-692-47797-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Flight Risk Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2015
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 strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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