A color-blind photographer searches the dark side of San Francisco for the killer of the street Adonis whose sordid life she'd been documenting. Fifteen years ago, Kay Farrow's father and a quartet of other cops put an end to the city's ``T case''—five young hustlers murdered and beheaded—by recusing the sixth victim before he could be killed too. But the victim ended up dying anyway; all the physical evidence mysteriously vanished from the scene; and four of the five cops ended up, like the unknown killer, getting eased into retirement. Now that Tim Lovsey, the beautiful prostitute Kay had been photographing for months, has been killed and dismembered, Kay can't help wondering what her father will have to say about the case, and how it's connected to his own well-publicized failure. Kay, whose photophobia (she sees only shades of gray, and is blinded by bright light) has made her a creature of the night as well, sets out to take another look at Tim's dark world through wraparound shades and a Contex viewfinder—at least until a bunch of tough guys beat her and steal the camera. She learns that although Tim was repeatedly sought out by opera stars and society types, his first loyalty was to his twin sister Ariane—a twin whose life was bound uncannily to his by David deGeoffroy, the ``uncle'' who trained them both to his vocation in magic, worked with them for years, and then watched them vanish with half his savings. It's an extravagantly promising setup, but the unraveling is a letdown: Kay's three problems (connecting Tim's murder to the T case, fingering the killer, tracking down Ariane) turn out to have all too little to do with each other, and to hold all too few surprises in store. As an exercise in atmosphere, though, Hunt's first novel is as glamorously seedy as a pristine print of a vintage film noir. (First printing of 100,000; $125,000 ad/promo)
Pub Date: June 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-399-14260-6
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
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
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