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 first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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