by Bert Silva ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 27, 2016
There’s nary a dull moment in this complex, relentlessly plotted, if bloated, maritime potboiler sure to keep readers alert.
An energetic tale explores murder, revenge, and corporate deceit playing out on the high seas.
Silva’s (New York Scramble, 2015, etc.) seafaring novel follows the son of a murdered man who is bent on avenging his death. During a sailing trip around the Channel Islands, Hank Serling and his attractive mate, Susann Carmody, encounter a struggling swimmer awash in the ocean. They rescue the waterlogged man only to be viciously harassed by aggressive Navy SEAL petty officer Glen Maddox, who’d been administering an ocean swim test to assess his cadets’ physical endurance. Later, Hank learns of his father Matthew’s death in his Wall Street brokerage firm’s office, finding the police explanation of suicide and that his dad was nearly penniless difficult to believe. Hank is left with controlling interest in his father’s million-dollar, 53-foot racing sailboat, Vendetta, which is currently operated by a shifty group of mariners. After police suddenly deem Matthew’s death a homicide, Hank springs into action to solve his father’s murder, reclaim the sailboat (by any means necessary), and exact justice on the killers. But his intentions cause more problems than they solve. Hank absconds with the boat, and police put a reward out for its recovery, which tempts short-tempered, recently terminated Maddox with both the idea of money and revenge on the man who indirectly caused his military career to end. Subplots branch off the main attraction and include a co-conspiratorial plan to cash in on politically charged Panamanian land, machinations by murderous embezzler Wilbur Gammon, a falsified bankruptcy scheme, and a group of nefarious bandits who try to kidnap Hank. In this suspenseful, dramatic work, Hank remains a formidable protagonist: tough, resilient, eager to right Gammon’s wrongdoing against his beloved father, and a man who knows his way around both a new Caribbean love interest, Tara, and a sailboat (“The feel of sailing a boat at night began to work its magic. He experienced a strange confidence, having done all he could for the boat. Hank…kept his mind on just the vital elements—the rig, the wind, the sea”). Silva’s assertive prose more than makes up for some rickety coincidences, an overblown storyline, and a drawn-out sequence on Isla de la Boca pitting Hank against a gun-toting Maddox and a freak hurricane.
There’s nary a dull moment in this complex, relentlessly plotted, if bloated, maritime potboiler sure to keep readers alert.Pub Date: June 27, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5238-1902-7
Page Count: 372
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Aug. 25, 2016
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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