A promising start to a California-set historical romance series.
Silver-fortune heir Brock St. Clair and Chinese fortune-cookie maker Blossom Sun meet a few days before the 1906 San Francisco earthquake in this debut title in a planned historical romance trilogy.
Rugged, handsome Brock ventures into Chinatown to fulfill fiancee Clarissa’s request to have fortune cookies at a dinner party she’s having for fellow Nob Hill socialite girlfriends. The visit proves life-changing. While buying the cookies, Brock spots Blossom, the lavender-eyed baker. They’re instantly attracted to each other. Blossom summoned the nerve to talk to Brock as part of a dare from two Chinatown pals, telephone operator Anna Mae and high-class prostitute Monique, to flirt with the first man she sees and not allow her father and grandmother to determine her life by marrying her off to a hulking Chinatown butcher. Brock and Blossom meet several times, and she visits at his ranch on the outskirts of town. The couple is there when the earthquake hits, causing them to rush back to the city to search for survivors, and Blossom receives earth-shattering news. First-time novelist Lentz weaves an effective underlying thread of suspense into what might otherwise be a rather tame from-different-worlds romance by heading up all chapters with a note explaining just how close the historic earthquake and its accompanying “firestorm” are to upending the characters and their plans. Adding spice are some surprisingly nuanced characterizations, with Clarissa not quite the snob cliché that one would expect and artistic aspirant Blossom more of a modern woman than wilting flower. Lentz also sets up some interesting tensions, most particularly intrafamilial competition. Overall, an admirable debut.
A promising start to a California-set historical romance series.Pub Date: April 13, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-9962936-0-0
Page Count: 334
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2015
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
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A suspenseful, professional-grade north country procedural whose heroine, a deft mix of compassion and attitude, would be...
Box takes another break from his highly successful Joe Pickett series (Stone Cold, 2014, etc.) for a stand-alone about a police detective, a developmentally delayed boy, and a package everyone in North Dakota wants to grab.
Cassandra Dewell can’t leave Montana’s Lewis and Clark County fast enough for her new job as chief investigator for Jon Kirkbride, sheriff of Bakken County. She leaves behind no memories worth keeping: her husband is dead, her boss has made no bones about disliking her, and she’s looking forward to new responsibilities and the higher salary underwritten by North Dakota’s sudden oil boom. But Bakken County has its own issues. For one thing, it’s cold—a whole lot colder than the coldest weather Cassie’s ever imagined. For another, the job she turns out to have been hired for—leading an investigation her new boss doesn’t feel he can entrust to his own force—makes her queasy. The biggest problem, though, is one she doesn’t know about until it slaps her in the face. A fatal car accident that was anything but accidental has jarred loose a stash of methamphetamines and cash that’s become the center of a battle between the Sons of Freedom, Bakken County’s traditional drug sellers, and MS-13, the Salvadorian upstarts who are muscling in on their territory. It’s a setup that leaves scant room for law enforcement officers or for Kyle Westergaard, the 12-year-old paperboy damaged since birth by fetal alcohol syndrome, who’s walked away from the wreck with a prize all too many people would kill for.
A suspenseful, professional-grade north country procedural whose heroine, a deft mix of compassion and attitude, would be welcome to return and tie up the gaping loose end Box leaves. The unrelenting cold makes this the perfect beach read.Pub Date: July 28, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-58321-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: April 21, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2015
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