Expertly judged writing, thoughtful observations, warm and likable characters: Siegel’s third thriller is a promising start,...
Engaging legal-suspenser about a sheriff’s detective and a case too troubling to call.
Lines of tension emerge at once as Los Angeles Times reporter Siegel (Actual Innocence, 1999, etc.) brings a slate of sharply etched characters onto the scene of a housefire in the mid-California coastal village of La Graciosa. Detective Doug Bard clearly riles Sheriff Howie Dixon, and Bard finds DA Angela Stark moves too quickly to judgment. Along with newspaper editor Jimmy O’Connor, whose presence also irks Dixon, they investigate the fire that took the life of genial Ollie Murta and one of his piano students, 11-year-old Merilee Cooper. Accidental death, Stark insists, with Dixon quickly lining up in agreement. The scrupulous and sensitive Bard disagrees: Clues suggest foul play. Before long, responding to Bard’s insistent prodding, Stark reverses her ruling and has crotchety Jed Jeremiah arrested for the crime. Still, Bard isn’t satisfied, finding the county’s case against Jeremiah too pat. When Stark and Dixon have the irrepressible Bard taken off the case, the detective goes it alone, with some investigative assistance from editor O’Connor. The involvement in the matter of developers who may transform the charmingly authentic village into another town of beige malls and condos becomes apparent. Pretty clear, too, is the perpetrator of the crime. The suspense, then, emerges from Bard’s need to uncover the evidence that nails his suspect before jurors convict Jeremiah in a swiftly moving trial. Troubling Bard is a possible link between his ex-wife Sasha and the developers. Indeed, the case is driven by the characters’ personal connections to it, by their past histories—by the lines of defense they construct for their actions. Justice becomes not an abstract issue, but a force buffeted by the emotions and ambitions of fallible men and women.
Expertly judged writing, thoughtful observations, warm and likable characters: Siegel’s third thriller is a promising start, perhaps, to a new series.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-43821-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2002
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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