A striking start to a series with solid action and arresting details but saddled with a bland hero.
A trigger-happy, Chandler-esque gangster story set in 1930s Chicago.
Bank robber Ross Duncan is wanted by the FBI. Looking for his late partner’s little sister in Chicago, Duncan suddenly finds himself being courted as a hired gun by both the Italian and the Irish mobs. He has ample opportunity to demonstrate his skill with a .45, and his dialogue has Philip Marlowe’s steely wit. But unlike Marlowe’s outings, this debut novel, the first of a projected series, is less sure of its protagonist’s moral compass and intentions. The Irish want Duncan to bump off an Italian mob captain, while the Italians want him as extra muscle on a poorly planned bank job. Eventually, both syndicates want him to rub out Chicago’s new, incorruptible federal prosecutor. Meanwhile, Duncan tracks down Elinore, the long-lost little sister, but she turns out to be a laudanum addict and the girlfriend of the head of the Irish mob. Bartley mixes up a stiff noir cocktail: sharp dialogue, shadowy settings, and severe, coldblooded violence. Unfortunately, up until a multichapter flashback two-thirds of the way through the story, Duncan is such a man of mystery that the heart of the book feels empty. He also seems starved for female companionship; Elinore initially slinks into the story like a femme fatale, but she elicits so many conflicting impulses from Duncan that their relationship ends up feeling tame and lifeless. A faint human connection with his widowed landlady and her young son similarly goes nowhere. Yet the outstanding final set piece, a tensely rendered raid on a federal office, nearly makes up for the holey story. The prose can sparkle, the atmosphere is there, period details are pitch-perfect, and the action scenes are executed with verve; hopefully, as the series progresses, Duncan will be inspired by his excellently rendered environment.
A striking start to a series with solid action and arresting details but saddled with a bland hero.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2012
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 225
Publisher: Acorn Independent Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 21, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Packed with riveting drama and painful truths, this book powerfully illustrates the devastation of abuse—and the strength of...
Hoover’s (November 9, 2015, etc.) latest tackles the difficult subject of domestic violence with romantic tenderness and emotional heft.
At first glance, the couple is edgy but cute: Lily Bloom runs a flower shop for people who hate flowers; Ryle Kincaid is a surgeon who says he never wants to get married or have kids. They meet on a rooftop in Boston on the night Ryle loses a patient and Lily attends her abusive father’s funeral. The provocative opening takes a dark turn when Lily receives a warning about Ryle’s intentions from his sister, who becomes Lily’s employee and close friend. Lily swears she’ll never end up in another abusive home, but when Ryle starts to show all the same warning signs that her mother ignored, Lily learns just how hard it is to say goodbye. When Ryle is not in the throes of a jealous rage, his redeeming qualities return, and Lily can justify his behavior: “I think we needed what happened on the stairwell to happen so that I would know his past and we’d be able to work on it together,” she tells herself. Lily marries Ryle hoping the good will outweigh the bad, and the mother-daughter dynamics evolve beautifully as Lily reflects on her childhood with fresh eyes. Diary entries fancifully addressed to TV host Ellen DeGeneres serve as flashbacks to Lily’s teenage years, when she met her first love, Atlas Corrigan, a homeless boy she found squatting in a neighbor’s house. When Atlas turns up in Boston, now a successful chef, he begs Lily to leave Ryle. Despite the better option right in front of her, an unexpected complication forces Lily to cut ties with Atlas, confront Ryle, and try to end the cycle of abuse before it’s too late. The relationships are portrayed with compassion and honesty, and the author’s note at the end that explains Hoover’s personal connection to the subject matter is a must-read.
Packed with riveting drama and painful truths, this book powerfully illustrates the devastation of abuse—and the strength of the survivors.Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5011-1036-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2016
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
A flabby, fervid melodrama of a high-strung Southern family from Conroy (The Great Santini, The Lords of Discipline), whose penchant for overwriting once again obscures a genuine talent. Tom Wingo is an unemployed South Carolinian football coach whose internist wife is having an affair with a pompous cardiac man. When he hears that his fierce, beautiful twin sister Savannah, a well-known New York poet, has once again attempted suicide, he escapes his present emasculation by flying north to meet Savannah's comely psychiatrist, Susan Lowenstein. Savannah, it turns out, is catatonic, and before the suicide attempt had completely assumed the identity of a dead friend—the implication being that she couldn't stand being a Wingo anymore. Susan (a shrink with a lot of time on her hands) says to Tom, "Will you stay in New York and tell me all you know?" and he does, for nearly 600 mostly-bloated pages of flashbacks depicting The Family Wingo of swampy Colleton County: a beautiful mother, a brutal shrimper father (the Great Santini alive and kicking), and Tom and Savannah's much-admired older brother, Luke. There are enough traumas here to fall an average-sized mental ward, but the biggie centers around Luke, who uses the skills learned as a Navy SEAL in Vietnam to fight a guerrilla war against the installation of a nuclear power plant in Colleton and is killed by the authorities. It's his death that precipitates the nervous breakdown that costs Tom his job, and Savannah, almost, her life. There may be a barely-glimpsed smaller novel buried in all this succotash (Tom's marriage and life as a football coach), but it's sadly overwhelmed by the book's clumsy central narrative device (flashback ad infinitum) and Conroy's pretentious prose style: ""There are no verdicts to childhood, only consequences, and the bright freight of memory. I speak now of the sun-struck, deeply lived-in days of my past.
Pub Date: Oct. 21, 1986
ISBN: 0553381547
Page Count: 686
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1986
SEEN & HEARD
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