An entertaining, fast-paced, and thoughtful debut thriller.
In this thriller, an investigative journalist suffers several near-death experiences while trying to clear his name after being falsely accused of murder.
After three years in Austin, Texas, as a TV investigative journalist, Peter Richards loses his job. Life only gets worse. Peter is ambushed during a prospective job interview with accusations he’d invented a story and ruined lives: “You’re a joke to this industry. A joke and a liar, Peter.” Not only that, the interview is recorded and shown on the 6 o’clock news. Peter becomes the chief suspect in the murder investigation of his neighbor Janice Walton. He’d seen suspicious activity—an albino florist picking up a banker’s box from Janice—and then witnessed a Department of Public Safety trooper shooting Janice. Peter calls 911, but evidence turns up implicating him. Not only that, the stress causes him a temporarily fatal heart attack. He’s revived and given a new “Electro-Flux heart,” but he’s arrested and handcuffed to the bed. Nevertheless, Peter manages to slip the hospital and investigation. Getting hold of the banker’s box, he discovers files related to a company called Endochrone, which has patented a new Alzheimer’s drug. Why were these files kept separate? What makes them dangerous to Endochrone? And is there any way out of the conspiracy that threatens to close its grip on Peter, his wife, and his child? In his debut novel, Barney writes an enjoyably fast-paced thriller that’s strengthened by Peter’s voice, which is intelligent, funny, and rueful: “I’m not really a block party kind of guy, I’m more of a sit at home and judge type of person.” Peter is a complex figure with an admirable ability to keep his head, and even minor characters get well-written back stories. The mystery twists and turns with unexpected developments, action, and suspense. Distracting errors abound, however: “You’re [sic] life, as you know it, is nothing but a small spec [sic] of sand on a beach the size of a million galaxy’s [sic].”
An entertaining, fast-paced, and thoughtful debut thriller.Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-9965888-0-5
Page Count: 262
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: May 9, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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