Though it ultimately doesn’t satisfy as either tragedy or farce, this is far more than an actor’s vanity project: Thewlis...
The first novel from actor Thewlis (best actor winner at Cannes for Mike Leigh’s Naked) is a rollicking, no-corpses-barred black comedy set in the London art world.
Well-regarded painter Hector Kipling has reached a plateau. His enormous portraits command top prices, but lately his longtime pal and rival, Lenny Snook, a conceptual artist, has eclipsed him in fame. Hector’s romance with Eleni is calm and happy, but doesn’t calm and happy mean stultifying, perilously close to bourgeois? What he needs, he muses, is a little death. Thewlis delivers a few little deaths (see Hector’s disastrous fling with an American poet who favors sex games involving lighters and knives), but his main preoccupation is the bigger kind, and death doesn’t come half-stepping: Suddenly Hector’s artist friend Kirk is terminal, likewise Eleni’s mother in Greece, likewise Hector’s father, and before long Hector’s life, personal and professional, goes into a death spiral. Alas, his sufferings are as stylized as opera, or slapstick (in one scene Hector, naked, dangles from a drainpipe outside the window of the deranged madman/dandy/sex-abuse victim who’s out to kill him). But the art-world milieu is deftly handled, and there’s a splendidly mean and morbid wit at play in this antic account of a man whose life seems a “drunken collaboration between Feydeau and Dante.”
Though it ultimately doesn’t satisfy as either tragedy or farce, this is far more than an actor’s vanity project: Thewlis has talent.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-4165-4121-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2007
Loose lips sink careers in this barn-burning first novel about a Supreme Court clerk who runs his mouth to a disastrously ill-chosen confidant. The Solicitor General is often called the Court's tenth justice, but don't tell that to the Court's 18 clerks, who are convinced the world revolves around them. So it's not surprising that Justice Mason Hollis's clerk Ben Addison, who knows the results of all the Court's decisions long before they're announced, mentions one of them to Rick Fagen, one of Hollis's old clerks. Alas, Rick is an imposter who never clerked for Hollis, but who's just wormed his way into Ben's confidence to get a tip that will allow him to make millions on the insider info. Worse, Rick seems to know everything about Ben's puny efforts to find out who he really is. Does he have an in with Ben's fellow-clerk Lisa Schulman? Or could he be getting the skinny from one of Ben's roommates—senatorial assistant William Oberman, State staffer Nathan Hollister, or Washington Herald reporter Eric Stroman—all of them childhood friends? Ben determines to nail Rick for his perfidy, but Rick simply responds by stepping up the pressure, demanding further tipoffs on sensitive cases and threatening to reveal Ben's involvement to the U.S. Marshals, who are already suspicious on account of a news story Eric filed on possible Court leaks. The more Rick's noose tightens, the more suspicious and shrill Ben grows about his old friends, whose fear of their bosses and parents and whose unfailingly juvenile dialogue (``Drop it'' and ``He's dead'' are Ben's stock responses to every new threat) suggest the Washington branch of St. Elmo's Fire. Meltzer spins a mean paranoid fantasy that'll have you turning pages in a frenzy to learn whether Ben and his equally strung-out buddies ever grow up. (Literary Guild super release; film rights to Fox 2000; author tour)
Pub Date: May 14, 1997
ISBN: 0-688-15089-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1997
Feel free to give these missing girls a miss.
Miranda’s thriller, told backward over a two-week period, finds heroine Nicolette "Nic" Farrell back home in Cooley Ridge to solve the 10-year-old case of her missing best friend, Corrine, as well as the fresh disappearance of neighbor Annaleise Carter.
With a slew of thrillers about disappearing women (inevitably called "girls" though they're adults) coming this spring and summer, Miranda (Soulprint, 2015, etc.) has a lot of competition. The gimmick of telling the story backward causes confusion more than it builds suspense, and the characters, including Nic; her rich, mostly offstage fiance, Everett; her ex-boyfriend Tyler, who happened to be dating Annaleise at the time of her disappearance—an icky twist—her brother, Daniel, and his pregnant wife, Laura, are all unmemorable figures with no real feelings or motivations. The one character who does elicit sympathy is Nic's father, forced to leave his home because of dementia. Yet it's because of his statements that he knows about a missing girl that the plot is set in motion—and how often does a small-town police force reopen a case because an old man mutters something, and no one can figure out if it’s about his neighbor or his daughter’s former best friend, now gone for 10 years? The chronology is frustrating, the characters are bland, and the plotting is sloppy.
Feel free to give these missing girls a miss.Pub Date: June 28, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5011-0796-2
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: March 29, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2016
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