The seventh volume in Newman's Precinct series is his first in hardcover, and he's earned it. This gripping New York City cop drama, featuring Detective Lieutenant Joe Dante, has all the raw naturalism of a good Sidney Lumet movie. The plot slams the reader with a sucker-punch upfront. A star pitcher for the Kansas City Royals is found dead of a heroin overdose the day he's favored to beat the Yankees in the final game of the American League championship series, and almost everyone, including the investigating officer, is ready to believe that Willie Cintron is just another young barrio boy destroyed by wealth and fame. But Barry Zajac, a Daily News sportswriter who has nurtured Willie since his high school days in Washington Heights, refuses to be so cynical. When smooth and handsome Detective Dante comes on the scene, he investigates every angle. Was the killer a high-roller from Long Island with too much at stake on the game? A loyal wife preventing Willie from testifying against her husband? A lowlife cousin from the ghetto who's in deep with Chinese drug dealers? Willie's slick agent? Or the even slicker young sales exec from the network that paid millions for the World Series? Newman juggles these plot twists and misleads readers with great skill, even if he occasionally overreaches—for instance by letting Dante inadvertently break up a huge arm of the Colombian drug cartel. The bloodletting is nasty and brutish and accompanied by lots of hard- boiled humor, all of it appropriate to the sociopaths who slither through these pages. At first the novel makes too many concessions to out-of- towners (opening chapters read as if written for Martians), but Newman eventually settles into a high-pitched groove: fast and strictly hardball.
Pub Date: July 13, 1994
ISBN: 0-399-13952-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1994
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
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
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