Hardly a conventional thriller, this red-meat narrative revisits a scenario reminiscent of Room at the Top or even The...
From Holden (The Jazz Bird, 2002, etc), an upwardly aspirational angry young man’s ambitions are corrupted by involvement with a manipulative couple and their daughter.
Working-class premed student Daniel (Syd) Redding dreams of murdering his lab boss,Ted Kessler, and Ted’s wife Joyce: “They were an unassailable monolith, moneyed and beautiful and installed high in the city’s society.” Ted’s paternalism and Joyce’s flirtatiousness have lured him into a complicated web of power, sex and voyeurism. Syd’s visceral response is characteristic of his brooding masculinity. More satisfying than bloodshed, however, is the idea of seducing their bookish daughter Jessi, who responds to Syd’s seduction with uncomplicated adoration. Syd brags at work of Jessi’s sexual enslavement in order to watch Ted squirm, although in fact Syd’s old-fashioned rectitude means that so far he has scarcely mussed Jessi’s hair. Ted reacts by hiring Ron, a heavy who beats Syd up with exhausting regularity. When Joyce lures Syd back into their affair, an implausible double life commences: mutually gratifying sex with Jessi on the one hand, and a tawdry S&M liaison with her mother on the other. Sense and logic drift further out the window as Syd’s inexplicable drive to self-destruction and professional failure is compounded by the risk of Jessi finding out. An equally high-intensity subplot involves Syd’s stepfather, birthmarked sister and possibly child-molesting pal Donny. Syd predicts, with portentous fatalism, that “it had gone bad, all of it, and was going to come crumbling down.” But in lieu of a showstopping conclusion, Holden supplies an offstage murder and an attempted suicide. All ends well for Syd and Jessi, but a final flashback undercuts at least some expectations while pulling together all those weighty themes of blood, bones, collusion and entrapment.
Hardly a conventional thriller, this red-meat narrative revisits a scenario reminiscent of Room at the Top or even The Graduate. As a version of the revenge melodrama, it is less a Greek tragedy, more catharsis lite.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-1297-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2004
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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