Leuci's first police procedural set away from N.Y.C. (where he served as a cop for 20 years: Captain Butterfly, Odessa Beach, etc.) turns out to be his best—an acrid, tangled tale of a cop's hunt for a crazed killer among the high and low of the nation's capital. Scott Ancelet, 40, is the D.C. detective who swears to get the ``beast'' who cut the throat of an unidentified teenage male prostitute, then masturbated on the body and left it in a local park. Aided by his partner, ``Big Mo'' Parks, Scott turns for clues to his main snitch, Cotton Mouth Johnson, an aging hooker-turned- crack-dealer/addict. Cotton can tell Scott little, but her pathetic, doomed struggle to escape a sadistic drug kingpin (to whom she owes money—the story's major subplot) compellingly burrows the action down into D.C.'s criminal underworld, detailed with a stinging grit that contrasts well with the upscale splendors enjoyed by beautiful black councilwoman Tamron Highseat and her husband, Philip—who finally identify the victim as Tamron's no- good nephew. Scott, a cop who lives on the edge—smoking and wenching his way into major heart trouble—instantly falls in lust for Tamron, even as Big Mo falls compassionately in love with Cotton. Amidst this smoky intrigue, violence flares out in a second, blackly comic subplot involving a pot dealer whose wife harpoons a rookie detective—and then the intrigue rushes back, denser still, as Scott follows the killer's trail into a den of pedophiles headed by Philip Highseat and a politically powerful contra general—and into an ultraviolent climax. Despite the familiar cast—the burned-out cop, the gold- hearted whore, etc.—a fast and nasty tale, told in snappy prose and reeking with the hard truths and stink of the streets.
Pub Date: Dec. 9, 1991
ISBN: 0-525-93383-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1991
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
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
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