Another ex-cop writes a novel—and in this overlong but impeccably authentic law-vs.-terrorists procedural, former NYPD captain Mahoney, like Joseph Wambaugh, Robert Daley, et al., shows why a pen, as well as a gun and a badge, are standard police equipment. Mahoney's hero is nothing new: He's a generic maverick NYPD detective, Brian McKenna, whose antics have gotten him exiled to Brooklyn. What is fresh is the author's astonishingly tight, almost minute-by-minute detailing of the five-day case that returns McKenna to the ``Bright Lights'' (Manhattan). The cop's break comes when he notes a suspicious character and trails him to a drug lair, where the cop kills the suspect in a shootout. That burst of violence, as it turns out, is the story's last until the final pages—a great rarity for a cop novel, but McKenna's intense focus on the nuts-and-bolts of detection and on bureaucratic cop-intrigue keeps the narrative energy pumping, albeit fitfully. Taped to the dead man's back are a severed finger and a photo of the amputee- -clues to a kidnapping, figures McKenna, who uses this discovery, plus his friendship with the chief of detectives, to lever onto Manhattan's Major Case Squad. Recognizing the amputee's shirt as a Brooks Brothers, the cop i.d.s the man as a rich Peruvian, while other clues point to the kidnappers as members of Peru's Shining Path guerrilla group. Piece by difficult piece, McKenna and his squad—fencing with brass and the obligatorily incompetent FBI agent, and using subterfuge, surveillance, phone taps, high-tech cameras, etc.—home in on the kidnappers' Spanish Harlem den. In a tense and moving conclusion, the cops raid the hideout—with the avowal, in order to prevent further kidnappings, to take no prisoners.... Short on action but very long on insider's savvy: a strong bet for patient police-procedural fans.
Pub Date: May 27, 1993
ISBN: 0-312-09288-1
Page Count: 384
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1993
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
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
