A tightly written and thoroughly engaging crime tale.
This sixth installment of a series features the ongoing adventures of a British cop.
For the past three years, Yorkshire-born expatriate Cole Thornton has run a bookshop in the sleepy surfer town of Shelter Cove, California. If the store is notable for anything, it’s for being one of the few businesses not yet bought by local land developer Arlo Rankoff. One day, a car crashes through the window of the shop, destroying Cole’s inventory and nearly killing motel owner and auxiliary police deputy Holly West, who came in to flirt with the Englishman. When Cole gets up and looks into the cab of the vehicle, all that’s left of the driver is his foot on the gas pedal. Soon Ben Gardner, Shelter Cove’s chief of police, arrives. He turns out to be angrier at Cole than at the surf bum he assumes to have driven the car. Gardner feels protective of Holly, the survivor of an abusive marriage, and he senses there’s something fishy going on with Cole. Gardner looks into the missing driver, who soon turns up dead. But Cole has bigger troubles to deal with: He hears that his violent, estranged younger brother, British cop Jim Grant, has been looking for him to settle some old business. First Cole’s ex–sister-in-law drops by to warn him, and then the dangerous man himself appears—out to bring his older brother to justice. Campbell (Beacon Hill, 2017, etc.) writes in a gracefully muscular prose enlivened by drolly cinematic dialogue: “ ‘I keep forgetting this is a litigious society. Poodle power.’ ‘You mean the woman dried her dog in the microwave?’ Cole raised his eyebrows. ‘What was General Electric thinking? Not putting that in the instructions.’ ‘I think it was a Samsung.’ ” The author excels at hiding the ball while still keeping readers invested in the story. It takes a while for Grant to show up, let alone for the main thrust of the plot to be revealed, but such inventive narrative strategies help Campbell keep his series fresh as it moves into its latest volume.
A tightly written and thoroughly engaging crime tale.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4834-8806-6
Page Count: 284
Publisher: Lulu Publishing Services
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2018
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
Genetically engineered dinosaurs run amok in Crichton's new, vastly entertaining science thriller. From the introduction alone—a classically Crichton-clear discussion of the implications of biotechnological research—it's evident that the Harvard M.D. has bounced back from the science-fantasy silliness of Sphere (1987) for another taut reworking of the Frankenstein theme, as in The Andromeda Strain and The Terminal Man. Here, Dr. Frankenstein is aging billionaire John Hammond, whose monster is a manmade ecosystem based on a Costa Rican island. Designed as the world's ultimate theme park, the ecosystem boasts climate and flora of the Jurassic Age and—most spectacularly—15 varieties of dinosaurs, created by elaborate genetic engineering that Crichton explains in fascinating detail, rich with dino-lore and complete with graphics. Into the park, for a safety check before its opening, comes the novel's band of characters—who, though well drawn, double as symbolic types in this unsubtle morality play. Among them are hero Alan Grant, noble paleontologist; Hammond, venal and obsessed; amoral dino-designer Henry Wu; Hammond's two innocent grandchildren; and mathematician Ian Malcolm, who in long diatribes serves as Crichton's mouthpiece to lament the folly of science. Upon arrival, the visitors tour the park; meanwhile, an industrial spy steals some dino embryos by shutting down the island's power—and its security grid, allowing the beasts to run loose. The bulk of the remaining narrative consists of dinos—ferocious T. Rex's, voracious velociraptors, venom-spitting dilophosaurs—stalking, ripping, and eating the cast in fast, furious, and suspenseful set-pieces as the ecosystem spins apart. And can Grant prevent the dinos from escaping to the mainland to create unchecked havoc? Though intrusive, the moralizing rarely slows this tornado-paced tale, a slick package of info-thrills that's Crichton's most clever since Congo (1980)—and easily the most exciting dinosaur novel ever written. A sure-fire best-seller.
Pub Date: Nov. 7, 1990
ISBN: 0394588169
Page Count: 424
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1990
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