Readers will find this crackerjack thriller hard to put down.
A hired killer desperately tries to stay one step ahead of a kingpin’s goons in this novel.
From pedophiles to rapists, Lou Braga disposes of “the garbage the justice system leaves by the curb.” But at the age of 68, the efficient killer is at high risk of a stroke or heart attack. A doctor emphatically urges him to get bypass surgery: “A convenient time is now.” But at present, Braga relates, “Convenient isn’t a word that springs to mind. I have a ruthless crime boss who wants me dead, a duffel bag full of stolen cash, a psycho who thinks he’s a renegade Indian warrior stalking me, and the grandson I never knew I had.” Plus, there is his estranged, substance-abusing daughter, whose life he has put in peril by stealing a half-million dollars 25 years ago from the dreaded Benny Epstein, “the kind of guy who never plays by the rules, always wins, and leaves death in his wake.” Epstein talks the talk (“You probably heard about me. About how I hate big mouths?” he threatens a disrespectful underling. “About what happens to people who have them?”). And though he lives in an assisted living facility, he operates his business “like a geriatric godfather,” according to Braga. Convinced that Epstein is responsible for the car accident that claimed his beloved girlfriend’s life, Braga is determined that for once he will get to see the kingpin lose. But first, he must reconnect with his daughter, Mia, and convince her to get out of town; rescue his dog that Epstein ordered kidnapped; and go up against a number of the crime boss’s vicious henchmen. The title of nationally syndicated cartoonist Summers’ (The Dark and the Dead, 2018, etc.) third novel seems to be baiting snarky critics, but downhill this thriller isn’t. Fast, yes; the pace rarely flags, beginning with Braga’s racing to get to his daughter before Epstein’s thugs do. There are several brutally suspenseful set pieces. Once readers know what the killers are capable of, it’s doubly effective when the author leaves their dirty work to the audience’s imagination. Less successful are the random chapters that provide other characters’ perspectives.
Readers will find this crackerjack thriller hard to put down.Pub Date: June 29, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-07-310526-7
Page Count: 309
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Jan. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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