A tangled but engrossing mystery populated by dynamic characters.
In this debut thriller, a California courier becomes immersed in a conspiracy of greed, missing persons, and powerful individuals who view murder as an occasional necessity.
Monk Buttman is simply delivering a couple of messages one day for the law firm Aeschylus and Associates. But on returning to the law office, he witnesses a murder and the killer leaving with a bag containing $25,000. Marsyas Durant, who works at the firm, asks Monk for discretion so the courier only tells the authorities he found the body. Durant then enlists Monk to track down the culprit, as the money taken was intended for A and A’s client Johnny Dulcimer. Monk teams up with Dulcimer’s associate Mr. Jones and also looks into the unexplained disappearance of Martin Delashay, another A and A client. It’s abundantly clear dangerous people are somehow involved, as two goons attack Monk. But what exactly they’re after is a mystery the protagonist struggles to unravel, though it may be greed; one theory suggests possible money laundering at Delashay’s software company, Sphere. Monk soon fears that the next time someone assaults him, the encounter will be more lethal than a beating. Meanwhile, he further complicates his life by juggling potential relationships with his neighbor Joanie; Dulcimer’s receptionist, Agnes; and Delashay’s wife, Judith. In this mystery series opener, Pearce’s plot is unquestionably convoluted, including the reason Durant asks Monk to investigate. But Monk’s first-person perspective is an easy-to-follow narrative, adequately keeping in check the novel’s copious characters. He’s likewise an intriguing protagonist with a curious backstory, most notably the fact that his father, Moses, runs a commune. There’s even an extended sequence with Monk and Agnes that deftly delves into both of their thorny pasts. But the book does run a bit too long, as it puts the mystery on the back burner just prior to the final act. Still, the author sublimely illustrates quieter moments throughout the story: “The sun, omnipotent and persistent, drove me from my fitful slumber and my comfy bed. I saw no reason to get up.”
A tangled but engrossing mystery populated by dynamic characters.Pub Date: Feb. 21, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-68433-203-8
Page Count: 308
Publisher: Black Rose Writing
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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