Sufficient mystery nearly overshadowed by stellar character subplots and a sweet but realistic father-daughter reunion.
A Phoenix PI and the teenage daughter he just learned he had find themselves embroiled in deception, murder, and human trafficking in Lewis’ debut thriller.
The latest drunken rant from Enid Iglowski’s mom comes with a shock: Enid’s father isn’t really her father. Enid tracks down her biological dad, Jack Fox, a private eye working in Arizona. Jack had no idea Enid existed, and he doesn’t know what to do with her. Plus, he’s already got enough on his plate: Jeni Hargrove hires him to find her real mother, while her wealthy sister Eve pays Jack to drop Jeni’s case. Detective Bud Orlean, meanwhile, may have a break in Daniel Hargrove’s presumed murder. Daniel, the sisters’ stepfather, has been missing for over three years; someone mailed a few body parts, including a heart, to the cops, but police have found what could be the rest of him. As Jack starts a dangerous relationship with Eve, he wonders why another private eye is following him—and who’s behind another, more recent murder. Despite Jack’s job, the murder investigation takes a back seat to an elaborate, albeit continually fascinating, soap opera. There are shades of a detective story: dark family secrets, more than one femme fatale, and Enid’s going undercover at a home for wayward girls to get some dirt on the Hargroves. But drama abounds, overwhelmingly so: Bud’s wife, Bunnie, threatens to divorce him if he won’t retire, and son Chip drops out of med school to become a writer; Petunia, with whom Jack had an affair, doesn’t seem to want to leave him alone; and Enid is terrified that Jack will hate her, but the stubborn girl doesn’t make liking her very easy. Rather than identifying a killer(s), the story eventually becomes more about who’s having (or wants to have) sex with whom. Enid is initially exasperating—she’s not above tantrums or milking others for sympathy since she was the result of a one-night stand—but she’ll grow on readers. Meanwhile, the banter and heated arguments between Jack and Enid are typically funny, almost endearing. She clearly wants a father, and his care for her is unmistakable. Lewis also drops in a few surprising turns both for the murders and the intermingling soap-operatic stories.
Sufficient mystery nearly overshadowed by stellar character subplots and a sweet but realistic father-daughter reunion.Pub Date: July 29, 2014
ISBN: 978-0990610809
Page Count: 384
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: May 15, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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