Jay Crawford has just escaped from a maximum security prison after serving 10 years for a rape he didn’t commit. Now he's about to realize that life as a fugitive may put everyone he loves in danger.
Weber returns with the cast of Married Men (2001), who are fiercely devoted to friendship, sex, and scandal. Pushed to confess to the crime in order to make parole, Jay busts out. Although his jailbreak may put each of his friends at risk for aiding and abetting, none of them shies away from doing what’s best for "the family." Soon U.S. Marshals show up in Kyle Richmond’s backyard—while he and his wife, Lisa, indulge in afternoon erotic play—and the pressure is on. Meanwhile, Wil Duncan is being downsized out of a job and courted by his uncle to join the shadowy family business, a job he would refuse, but his wife, Diane, has grown quite accustomed to living in style. The fourth friend, Allen, is realizing that his newlywed wife, Cassie, may be less trustworthy than he thought. Despite the risks, the friends band together to help Jay evade the marshals. But Jay’s troubles with the law pale in comparison to the repercussions he fears from Ashlee, his accuser. Will she exact revenge through his family? Disguised as a woman, Jay begins his own detective work, which collides with his friends’ troubles at every turn. Staccato sentences, rapidly shifting perspectives, and multiple plot twists propel Weber’s storyline. While the speed ratchets up the tension, it barely obscures the thinness of the characters. The women, in particular, suffer, with each assessed according to her physique, sexual availability, and loyalty to her man’s wishes.
A testosterone-driven tale of bromance and beautiful yet shifty women.Pub Date: Jan. 17, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4555-0527-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2016
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
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While a few weeks ago it seemed as if Praeger would have a two month lead over Dutton in their presentation of this Soviet best seller, both the "authorized" edition (Dutton's) and the "unauthorized" (Praeger's) will appear almost simultaneously. There has been considerable advance attention on what appears to be as much of a publishing cause celebre here as the original appearance of the book in Russia. Without entering into the scrimmage, or dismissing it as a plague on both your houses, we will limit ourselves to a few facts. Royalties from the "unauthorized" edition will go to the International Rescue Committee; Dutton with their contracted edition is adhering to copyright conventions. The Praeger edition has two translators and one of them is the translator of Doctor Zhivago Dutton's translator, Ralph Parker, has been stigmatized by Praeger as "an apologist for the Soviet regime". To the untutored eye, the Dutton translation seems a little more literary, the Praeger perhaps closer to the rather primitive style of the original. The book itself is an account of one day in the three thousand six hundred and fifty three days of the sentence to be served by a carpenter, Ivan Denisovich Shukhov. (Solzhenitsyn was a political prisoner.) From the unrelenting cold without, to the conditions within, from the bathhouse to the latrine to the cells where survival for more than two weeks is impossible, this records the hopeless facts of existence as faced by thousands who went on "living like this, with your eyes on the ground". The Dutton edition has an excellent introduction providing an orientation on the political background to its appearance in Russia by Marvin Kalb. All involved in its publication (translators, introducers, etc.) claim for it great "artistic" values which we cannot share, although there is no question of its importance as a political and human document and as significant and tangible evidence of the de-Stalinization program.
Pub Date: June 15, 1963
ISBN: 0451228146
Page Count: 181
Publisher: Praeger
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1963
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
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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. 22, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
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