A heady, visceral police thriller.
In Nelson’s debut crime thriller, a city cop faces an evil conspiracy.
Anthony Maddoc is a scarred soul, with a violent, traumatic past as a soldier in Vietnam. He channels that dark energy into his job as a policeman in New York City, where he’s faced with the vicissitudes of human nature, in the office as well as on the street. A deep feud between Maddoc and a hellbent, barbarous lieutenant precedes a series of tragic events. Maddoc’s wife, Marie, is murdered during a mysterious home invasion, in which their house is nearly burned to the ground; later, their daughter, Sylvi, is kidnapped by people whose practices are as bizarre and intricate as their ties to the police force, powerful corporations, politics, and the Catholic Church. Meanwhile, members of the massive, secretive Matterlink Foundation seek information about a strange man, Otha Gubbin, who is the head of a black-market adoption agency and a notorious rapist, bigamist, and cult leader. He preys on young, naïve homeless women and sells their infants for ridiculous profit. Sylvi soon finds herself embroiled in this horrific underworld of murder, coercion, and sexual assault, wondering how to stay alive. Maddoc and his few trusted friends pursue her, hoping to unravel the mystery, as those involved with Matterlink try to cover their tracks. This remarkable thriller offers psychological intricacy and intellectual substance. Nelson makes its criminal activities seem real and convincing, never sacrificing palpable details for generalizations. Ultimately, it’s a story about the consequences of revenge and about what can happen when the hidden, insidious machinery of power reaches into everyday life. It also balances its commitment to its plot with rousing, sudden flashes of action: “Erla came at him with the stick. Vincent, his combat instincts taking over, deflected the stick and smashed her nose flat and to the left of her face with the heel of his hand. She passed out.”
A heady, visceral police thriller.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-4575-3239-9
Page Count: -
Publisher: Dog Ear
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 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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