Sci-fi and criminology deftly merge in this well-paced tale.
In this debut novel, a lawyer hopes that cutting-edge techniques in suspended animation can solve his problems with the Mafia.
Attorney Patrick Brádaigh lives in Westchester County, New York, and runs the Law Offices of Brady and Sons. For years, while enjoying a seemingly idyllic life with his wife, Colleen, and twin sons, Nick and Andy, Patrick unwittingly works for the Leggiano crime family. When he realizes his mistake, he begins keeping records on the Sicilian Mafia and its murderous operations. To remove the lawyer’s leverage, the mobsters burgle his estate. Trying to steal the records from a vault, a thief murders Colleen. Ten years later, her killer might go free, but Patrick still smolders at the chance for vengeance. The Brádaigh family goes on vacation to the Galápagos Islands, and it’s there that Patrick meets Dr. Kryten Vandermere, who is researching how iguanas remain underwater for extended periods—which will help NASA place humans in hibernation during deep space travel. He explains to her his idea for storing violent criminals in underground sleep chambers, where they won’t burden taxpayers but can be awakened if necessary. Little does the doctor know that Patrick has the Leggiano family marked for a more permanent kind of storage. Arden crafts a sci-fi thriller that heavily embraces family dynamics and red herrings. He teases readers, for example, when Andy says that he and Nick “did a lot of switching around” as children but “never got caught in the act.” Arden also schools audiences in the finances of maintaining a prison: “The approximately hundred and fifty thousand prisoners serving life sentences alone are costing law abiding citizens over four billion a year in hard-earned tax dollars.” That many of the female characters are sexpots—especially Andy’s friend Ronni Marcus, president and CEO of Marcus Manufacturing—gives the narrative a pulpy feel. Intense violence typical of the genre plays a minimal role except in the opening homicide sequence and the surprising finale, which act as brutal bookends to a story that succeeds on the strength of its ideas.
Sci-fi and criminology deftly merge in this well-paced tale.Pub Date: Feb. 28, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4834-3270-0
Page Count: 242
Publisher: Lulu
Review Posted Online: June 22, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
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
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
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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