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
Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.
Pub Date: April 5, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-41224-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
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