An ordinary crime story improved by a dash of Italian flavor.
When an unpopular restaurateur is stabbed in the back at Sophia Mancini’s family dinner party, the intrepid private eye combs through her 1940s Italian-American community on the hunt for the killer.
Mickelson’s (Carol’s Christmas, 2012, etc.) Little Italy–set murder mystery, the first of a planned series, features a wide cast of characters: an amnesiac WWII veteran, wives hoping to be widows, sleazy gangsters and cops showing up to murder scenes in baseball uniforms. At the center of it all is Sophia, who runs a newly formed detective agency with her brother, Angelo, the amnesiac vet. They’re desperately in need of a murder case to bring in some money so they can prove to the court that Angelo’s son will be provided for. At a dinner to celebrate the Mancini’s new business venture, the restaurant owner, Vincenzo, is murdered; everyone’s a suspect. The police don’t want Sophie snooping about, but the local mob boss, Frank Vidoni, hires her to solve the crime before the police do, since unauthorized murder in his territory damages his reputation as a crime lord. On the way to solving the crime, Sophie runs across numerous strange and memorable characters, including Eugene Gallo, Vincenzo’s bizarre business partner; Stella, Vincenzo’s wife, who had hoped he wouldn’t come home from the war; and Maria Acino, Frank’s beautiful but childish mistress, who always seems to materialize into a scene out of thin air. The characters make standard detective-story fare stand out. With such a large group of people to work with, readers might expect some of the characters to blur together or messily coalesce, but that’s not the case. Everyone’s well-realized and fully fleshed-out, with the possible exception of the extended Mancini family, who remain faithful to typical big, Italian-American family stereotypes. Despite the somewhat conventional, unsurprising plot, Mickelson’s novel remains compulsively readable and consistently entertaining.
An ordinary crime story improved by a dash of Italian flavor.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2012
ISBN: 978-0985129606
Page Count: 260
Publisher: Bon Accord Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
