by Barbara DeShong ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 15, 2015
An often riveting tale in which solving a murder helps the protagonist learn more about herself.
An Austin, Texas–based psychologist looks into a childhood friend’s murder and uncovers secrets that could prove fatal in DeShong’s (Too Rich and Too Thin, Not an Autobiography, 2015) thriller.
Jessica LeFave is understandably distraught when cops find her friend, Camilla Cervantes, with a bullet in her head. But she becomes angry when Detective Don Wilder suggests that the murder, staged like a blood sacrifice, ties her friend to a drug cartel. She’s convinced the killing is more personal, so she searches for answers in Mexico City, where Camilla rescued young girls who’d been forced into prostitution. Jessica also hopes to find Diego de la Cruz, Camilla’s ex-husband and the father to their daughter, Ana Teresa. But it turns out that Camilla may have hidden some of her life from Jessica, leading the psychologist to stir up dangerous people. Jessica undoubtedly wants to track down the killer in order to satisfy her sense of justice and to debunk the notion that Camilla was involved in the drug business. But she’s likewise burdened with guilt over never visiting years ago when Camilla was in a mental hospital, and part of her reasoning for locating Diego lies in her own unmistakable infatuation with the “gorgeous” man. Jessica also struggles to come to terms with the troubling memory of her stepdaughter Kelly’s suicide; she repeatedly equates Camilla with Kelly, as they both had bipolar disorder. Despite the driving fact of Camilla’s murder, this novel is less a mystery than it is a tale of Jessica’s self-discovery. DeShong devotes most of the story to her absorbing protagonist, whose first husband was her stepbrother and who lost her second to murder. As an investigator, though, Jessica is lacking; she carries no cellphone (thanks to a “phone phobia”), and uses her lawyer buddy George’s phone to do basic Internet searches or peruse Facebook. However, the story boasts moments of suspense, such as a discovery of a slashed tire that could either be a warning or a threat. It also offers comic relief in the form of Jessica’s attention-hogging dogs, Suzi and Sammie.
An often riveting tale in which solving a murder helps the protagonist learn more about herself.Pub Date: July 15, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-692-49212-3
Page Count: 316
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
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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
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by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951
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
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