A fine Chicago procedural that proves its worth in day-to-day grit.
The second installment in Shaffer’s (His Honor, 2012) crime series about Chicago Police Lt. Ed Slate tracks a murder investigation from the Windy City’s suburbs to Hong Kong and beyond.
Slate heads up a new Major Crimes Section on the north side of Chicago with a full caseload on his hands, including a gang killing, a cab-driver homicide, and the robbery and death of a diamond salesman. Meanwhile, Susan Thanajaro, an attractive Asian-American med-school student, has disappeared from her dorm room at Northwestern University, leaving only a “narrow splash” of blood behind. Slate methodically works leads in the Thanajaro case, investigating a university janitor and her current and ex-boyfriends, who all have histories of sexual violence and seem likely suspects, until an important clue falls into Slate’s lap: a phone call from Hong Kong. Slate dispatches Roger Daniels, a trusted Vietnam buddy, to investigate, and the narrative travels with him through the streets of Hong Kong. In the end, the hardworking Slate finally gets his man. Shaffer sketches the wide-ranging investigation in exacting detail, right down to the paperwork, and paints a true-to-life picture of what law enforcement really entails: days that start with coffee and a Danish; pressure from higher-ups to balance hot cases with less-interesting ones; stretches of unfruitful legwork punctuated by violence; and commiseration with colleagues about when to retire. Slate and his right-hand man, Sgt. Joe Barona, also have their quirks: tall, dark Barona likes expensive suits, while Slate wears his trademark “Colombo coat.” Although the dialogue tends to be heavier and more fact-laden than the average gruff detective’s bark, it nonetheless serves the story well.
A fine Chicago procedural that proves its worth in day-to-day grit.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1457519079
Page Count: 386
Publisher: Dog Ear
Review Posted Online: Aug. 13, 2013
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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