A gripping ride-along with a small-town detective in the midst of a national security crisis.
A fast-paced political thriller set during the Reagan presidency.
In Minier’s debut page turner, Vietnam veteran Lt. Michael Page works a fairly routine job with the Santa Barbara Police Department until someone murders the American ambassador to Turkey. When Michael first became a cop over a decade ago, he was called to a hotel where two Turkish consuls were murdered. The connection to the recent event is not lost on him, and soon he receives notes from the unknown madman, threatening to assassinate more federal officials. Dubbed the Poet Killer for his foreboding notes sent to police, this terrorist, who signs his notes Antranik, delights in the morbid game he plays and seeks a place in history. Antranik looks to be retaliating against Turkey’s Armenian genocide of 1915. Persistent Michael tries to decipher Antranik’s poems to figure out where he plans to strike next so he can catch the assassin before more casualties occur. After another prominent figure falls victim, the stakes climb even higher. Even the president isn’t immune to the dangerous Antranik as the suspense rages on in this what-could-have-happened roller-coaster ride based on the actual assassination of two Turkish diplomats in 1973. As the manhunt continues, Antranik’s allegiances and reasons come into question, and his connection to the Russians causes panic among government officials who fear nuclear war. The investigation brings Michael to Lela Drew, a disappointingly one-dimensional love interest who is a graduate student of Armenian history. When romantic feelings develop between them, their lives become entangled, putting them both in danger. The characters are a bit clichéd and predictable, but they are appropriate in this cop drama. It is clear that Minier knows his characters and their world, effectively conveying their nuances, with the exception of Lela. Minier’s simple, engrossing style works well with a narrative rich with historical details. The author skillfully weaves a substantial web of deceit, murder and mystery.
A gripping ride-along with a small-town detective in the midst of a national security crisis.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0615531939
Page Count: 342
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 14, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 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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