Next book

SUMMER'S REASON

Another barely fictional account (``the criminal activities portrayed are happening in real life, today'') of malfeasance in the Sunshine State, courtesy of police chronicler McDonald (the nonfictional Under Contract: A Cop Hired to Kill, 1992, etc.). It looks like blue skies ahead for motorcycle patrol officer Jessie Summer after she breaks up a jewel robbery, leaving one thief dead. She's temporarily reassigned to Homicide to follow up the case, and laid-back local mobster Dominic Tatari offers to swap her some info on an unsolved homicide if she'll deliver $300,000 to some tough Latinos his son Dom is mixed up with. Jessie makes the payoff, but returns to find Tatari killed, no-good Dom in charge of his father's interests, and herself in the middle of a mess that gets worse every time Dom flexes his muscles. He moves from drug smuggling, prostitution (through his strip club, Dreamland), and kiddie porn to the main event, child slavery, with the help of his ruthless Philippine connections—all while cultivating his squeaky- clean relationship with Rapier Marine CEO Tiffany Eastin (also the beneficiary of a timely parental demise) and her brother Jack. In a Chandleresque departure from McDonald's generally gritty realism, the upscale Eastins turn out to be the kinkiest couple of all: Tiffany invites Jessie over to her pool with a photo session cum seduction in mind, and she's constantly squabbling with Jack about who's going to be the real best friend of the Philippine girl scheduled to be delivered to them. A second fit of John Wayne heroics with a hostage-taking pornographer in a crowded store sends Jessie back to patrol duty, but never fear: She'll overcome official back-stabbing and her traumatic memories of her own childhood abuse to finish off whatever villains haven't already wiped each other out. A cops-and-robbers thriller so chockablock with subplots, walk-ons, and unfocused revulsion that it reads like an unedited brainstorming session for a whole season of Miami Vice.

Pub Date: Oct. 14, 1994

ISBN: 1-55611-409-5

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Donald Fine

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1994

Categories:

Awards & Accolades

Likes

  • Readers Vote
  • 33


Our Verdict

  • Our Verdict
  • GET IT


  • Kirkus Reviews'
    Best Books Of 2015


  • Kirkus Prize
  • Kirkus Prize
    winner


  • National Book Award Finalist

Next book

A LITTLE LIFE

The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.

Awards & Accolades

Likes

  • Readers Vote
  • 33


Our Verdict

  • Our Verdict
  • GET IT


  • Kirkus Reviews'
    Best Books Of 2015


  • Kirkus Prize
  • Kirkus Prize
    winner


  • National Book Award Finalist

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

Categories:
Next book

TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.

Pub Date: July 11, 1960

ISBN: 0060935464

Page Count: 323

Publisher: Lippincott

Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960

Categories:
Close Quickview