A promising concept flattened by overdevelopment and inattention to nuance. Maybe next time.
Racial inequality inspires a complex revenge plot in this sprawling first novel from Brooklyn law professor Troutt (stories: The Monkey Suit, 1998, etc.).
It’s set in 1990s Harlem, where three luckless black citizens drift into an “investment club” that offers a chance to “take back” opportunities denied them by a complacent white power structure. Late-30ish single mom Sidarra is frustrated by her second-class status at the “Board of Miseducation” where she suffers demotions and pay cuts as unqualified white coworkers rise to the top, and by a stalled relationship with her underachieving boyfriend Michael, a subway token booth vendor. Griff Coleman, an overworked public defender for (usually guilty) poor black clients, is fed up with the arrogance of a legal system that disrespects him, and by his wife Belinda, a successful investment banker who taunts him for not making more of himself. Yakoob Jones, meanwhile, a comedian moonlighting as a computer programmer, wants to stick it to whites-only power structures that scarcely acknowledge his existence. The solution: the Cicero Dean Investment Club, which “target[s]…major player[s] in the black people humiliation business,” employing carefully orchestrated credit-card fraud, identity theft and nonexistent (‘dummy’) corporations to purchase majority stock and engage in interstate commerce funded by stolen money. It works—until the inclusion of violence-prone drug dealer Raul raises stakes alarmingly, and the Club’s pyramid of profits comes tumbling down. This overstuffed novel nevertheless earns good marks for its nifty premise, crisp dialogue and well-handled plot. But it’s overdrawn. The same grievances are repeatedly aired, the same points hammered home incessantly. And when smoldering Sidarra and Adonis-like Griff tumble from collusion into the sack, Troutt succumbs to romance-novel rapture (“He wandered over her magnificence in search of thresholds to cross”).
A promising concept flattened by overdevelopment and inattention to nuance. Maybe next time.Pub Date: May 1, 2007
ISBN: 0-06-078929-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
A convicted killer’s list of five people he wants dead runs the gamut from the wife he’s already had murdered to franchise heroine Ali Reynolds.
Back in the day, women came from all over to consult Santa Clarita fertility specialist Dr. Edward Gilchrist. Many of them left his care happily pregnant, never dreaming that the father of the babies they carried was none other than the physician himself, who donated his own sperm rather than that of the handsome, athletic, disease-free men pictured in his scrapbook. When Alexandra Munsey’s son, Evan, is laid low by the kidney disease he’s inherited from his biological father and she returns to Gilchrist in search of the donor’s medical records, the roof begins to fall in on him. By the time it’s done falling, he’s serving a life sentence in Folsom Prison for commissioning the death of his wife, Dawn, the former nurse and sometime egg donor who’d turned on him. With nothing left to lose, Gilchrist tattoos himself with the initials of five people he blames for his fall: Dawn; Leo Manuel Aurelio, the hit man he’d hired to dispose of her; Kaitlyn Todd, the nurse/receptionist who took Dawn’s place; Alex Munsey, whose search for records upset his apple cart; and Ali Reynolds, the TV reporter who’d helped put Alex in touch with the dozen other women who formed the Progeny Project because their children looked just like hers. No matter that Ali’s been out of both California and the news business for years; Gilchrist and his enablers know that revenge can’t possibly be served too cold. Wonder how far down that list they’ll get before Ali, aided once more by Frigg, the methodical but loose-cannon AI first introduced in Duel to the Death (2018), turns on them?
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how little the boundary-challenged AI, who gets into the case more or less inadvertently, differs from your standard human sidekick with issues.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5101-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
This ran in the S.E.P. and resulted in more demands for the story in book form than ever recorded. Well, here it is and it is a honey. Imagine ten people, not knowing each other, not knowing why they were invited on a certain island house-party, not knowing their hosts. Then imagine them dead, one by one, until none remained alive, nor any clue to the murderer. Grand suspense, a unique trick, expertly handled.
Pub Date: Feb. 21, 1939
ISBN: 0062073478
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Dodd, Mead
Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1939
SEEN & HEARD
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