Millennial politics in 2001, in a sumptuous sequel to McCarry's long-running series about secret agent Paul Christopher's family (Second Sight, 1991, etc.). McCarry wastes no time in establishing his electrifying premise: On the eve of President Bedford Forrest Lockwood's second inaugural, his defeated opponent, Franklin Mallory, announces, first to Lockwood and then to the world, that someone in Lockwood's campaign stole the election by manipulating computerized vote tallies in three key states. Will Lockwood resign in Mallory's favor? He will not, thank you, but instead prepares for the inevitable impeachment trial by allowing his chief of staff—Christopher's cousin Julian Hubbard—to nominate as his new Chief Justice (who will by law preside over the trial) the strenuously unaffiliated Archimedes Hammett—that staunch courtroom defender of terrorists and consumer of natural foods. But Hubbard and Hammett, members of the utopian and ultra-secret Shelley Society since their days at Yale, are playing a far deeper game than Lockwood realizes. What they plan, together with the other Shelleyans who've honeycombed the government, is nothing less than the collapse of the presidency and the dawn of a totalitarian new government. It's Seven Days in May all over again, of course, but this time with every thrust and counterthrust—except for a single puzzling assassination early on—planned strictly within the laws of the land. As the Shelleyans plot to show how the Constitution allows for the nation to be delivered legally into the hands of a far-left dictatorship, McCarry grooms Christopher's now-grown daughter Zarah for a crucial role as political mediator and assassination bait. Even discounting the baroque embellishments that keep threatening to derail the story—Ouija board revelations, excursions into Mani†te folkways, impassioned accounts of new technologies for embryo recovery, leisurely portraits of every citizen residing within the Beltway—McCarry plots with a grand extravagance that generates tremendous suspense and leaves you more shaken than ever once you've turned the last page.
Pub Date: June 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-679-41533-5
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1995
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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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