This is a splendid story filled with betrayal and disaster. Readers prone to schadenfreude will find it doubly delicious.
A tale dripping with blood and money in a family that’s far more fun to read about than it would be to live with.
“So listen,” the narrator begins, and you feel like he’s confiding in you about a bunch of crooks he knows. But no, he’s “selling them out to you” as though he’s more snitch than storyteller. “There is blood everywhere,” he assures “dear reader” near the beginning, and in due time, it’s a promise amply kept. What else to expect from people who make some of their riches from involuntary organ donors? The bulk of the story takes place in Cleveland, with side trips to Ukraine. Cleveland is “a city built to make money and a city that money built, built and took apart, again and again.” There are two cousins named Peter Hightower. One is a journalist, and one, Petey, is a criminal who evolves from Petro Garko to Pete the Uke to Peter Henry Hightower, falsely claiming to have gone to Yale. “How much money does my family have?” asks the other Peter Hightower. The answer is that they stopped counting long ago. Their grandfather was a thug with deep Ukrainian roots. The criminal tradition continues in Cleveland, with the women just as vicious as the men—but will that be enough against a rival named The Wolf? Slattery goes into rich digressions such as the fatal Sugar Ray Robinson–Jim Doyle fight, and he does them so well the reader doesn’t care that they’re only tangential to the storyline. And one could fill a page with all the novel’s quotable lines; “I love you means I will bleed you dry” tops the list.
This is a splendid story filled with betrayal and disaster. Readers prone to schadenfreude will find it doubly delicious.Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-60980-563-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Seven Stories
Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
With its flat, staccato tone and mournful mood, it’s almost as if the book itself were suffering from depression.
A young Philadelphia policewoman searches for her addicted sister on the streets.
The title of Moore’s (The Unseen World, 2016, etc.) fourth novel refers to “a long bright river of departed souls,” the souls of people dead from opioid overdoses in the Philadelphia neighborhood of Kensington. The book opens with a long paragraph that's just a list of names, most of whom don’t have a role in the plot, but the last two entries are key: “Our mother. Our father.” As the novel opens, narrator Mickey Fitzpatrick—a bright but emotionally damaged single mom—is responding with her partner to a call. A dead girl has turned up in an abandoned train yard frequented by junkies. Mickey is terrified that it will be her estranged sister, Kacey, whom she hasn’t seen in a while. The two were raised by their grandmother, a cold, bitter woman who never recovered from the overdose death of the girls' mother. Mickey herself is awkward and tense in all social situations; when she talks about her childhood she mentions watching the other kids from the window, trying to memorize their mannerisms so she could “steal them and use them [her]self.” She is close with no one except her 4-year-old son, Thomas, whom she barely sees because she works so much, leaving him with an unenthusiastic babysitter. Opioid abuse per se is not the focus of the action—the book centers on the search for Kacey. Obsessed with the possibility that her sister will end up dead before she can find her, Mickey breaches protocol and makes a series of impulsive decisions that get her in trouble. The pace is frustratingly slow for most of the book, then picks up with a flurry of revelations and developments toward the end, bringing characters onstage we don’t have enough time to get to know. The narrator of this atmospheric crime novel has every reason to be difficult and guarded, but the reader may find her no easier to bond with than the other characters do.
With its flat, staccato tone and mournful mood, it’s almost as if the book itself were suffering from depression.Pub Date: Jan. 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-525-54067-0
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
This thriller is taut and fast-paced but lacks compelling protagonists.
Three siblings who have been out of touch for more than 20 years grapple with their unsettling childhoods, but when the youngest inherits the family home, all are drawn back together.
At the age of 25, Libby Jones learns she has inherited a large London house that was held in a trust left to her by her birthparents. When she visits the lawyer, she is shocked to find out that she was put up for adoption when she was 10 months old after her parents died in the house in an apparent suicide pact with an unidentified man and that she has an older brother and sister who were teenagers at the time of their parents' deaths and haven't been seen since. Meanwhile, in alternating narratives, we're introduced to Libby's sister, Lucy Lamb, who's on the verge of homelessness with her two children in the south of France, and her brother, Henry Lamb, who's attempting to recall the last few disturbing years with his parents during which they lost their wealth and were manipulated into letting friends move into their home. These friends included the controlling but charismatic David Thomsen, who moved his own wife and two children into the rooms upstairs. Henry also remembers his painful adolescent confusion as he became wildly infatuated with Phineas, David’s teenage son. Meanwhile, Libby connects with Miller Roe, the journalist who covered the story about her family, and the pair work together to find her brother and sister, determine what happened when she was an infant, and uncover who has recently been staying in the vacant house waiting for Libby to return. As Jewell (Watching You, 2018, etc.) moves back and forth from the past to the present, the narratives move swiftly toward convergence in her signature style, yet with the exception of Lucy’s story, little suspense is built up and the twists can’t quite make up for the lack of deep characters and emotionally weighty moments.
This thriller is taut and fast-paced but lacks compelling protagonists.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-9010-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Aug. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2019
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