A delicious blend of romance and thriller that goes down smoothly.
An amoral grifter chooses the wrong person to victimize in this novel told from multiple viewpoints.
The titular character in this third book by O’Sullivan (The Patsy, 2018, etc.) is Olive Fairbanks. Olive, 26, is an intelligent, attractive wannabe writer who is tending bar to pay the bills in Los Angeles. She has always been unlucky in love until handsome Austin Jenkins walks into her bar, The Belly Flop. The chiseled Southerner sweeps Olive off her feet. Austin seems too good to be true, and he is. Con artist Becca Poe is blackmailing Austin with a video from high school. Her plan is to have Austin trick Olive to get inside the mansion of Barry Gant, the bar owner who has long been infatuated with the bartender. Becca has learned that Barry keeps hundreds of thousands of dollars in his home safe. This home invasion would be under the pretense of Austin wanting to open a bar and seeking Barry’s advice. Becca’s scheme works flawlessly. Her thuggish accomplice, Chet Watkins, knocks out Olive and kills Barry. Then Becca shoots Austin and Chet. She steals more than $600,000 but leaves behind $75,000 to fool investigators into thinking that the robbers, Olive, and Barry killed one another. Her big mistake is that Olive, who Becca thought was dying, survives Chet’s attack, and the bartender wants to discover the truth. O’Sullivan has created a winning protagonist in Olive, who grew up as a Nancy Drew fan and is determined to figure out how she was used in this scheme that left Barry dead. “Bad seed” Becca proves Olive’s ideal foil. Spineless Austin is caught in the middle, falling for Olive but doomed as Becca’s pawn. Employing multiple voices is O’Sullivan’s very effective narrative device in this engrossing tale. These include not only the three main characters, but also Richard, the desperate detective whom Olive hires to help her track down Becca. Having each describe the action helps readers better understand the players. Let’s hope the author brings back intriguing bartender/detective Olive for another case.
A delicious blend of romance and thriller that goes down smoothly.Pub Date: June 20, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-9992956-3-2
Page Count: 279
Publisher: Big B Publishing
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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