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CALIFORNIA FIRE AND LIFE

Whether you’re new to arson-fraud fiction or an old fan, this burn-by-burn account—think Double Indemnity in flames—could be the only novel on the subject you’ll ever need. Jack Wade, bounced off the Orange County Sheriff’s Office 12 years ago for beating a confession out of a suspect and lying about it under oath, has been a bulldog claims investigator for California Fire and Life Mutual ever since, but he’s about to meet his match (to make one of the few arson puns Winslow doesn’t exploit). Society fund-raiser Pamela Vale has been burned to death in a home fire that Jack’s old nemesis, fire investigator Brian Bentley, has pronounced accidental. Based on a survey of the physical evidence that would do Patricia Cornwell proud, Jack’s certain Pam Vale and her house were torched, and just as certain the arsonist is her husband Nicky, who phoned Jack to discuss his claim the morning after the blaze. Jack doesn’t know about Nicky’s ties to the KGB and the Russian mafia (which Winslow, as thorough as Jack, explains in numbing detail), but he can see that the good times had stopped rolling for the overextended developer; he doesn’t believe the alibi Nicky’s controlling mother gives him; and he’s shocked but delighted when his former lover, Sheriff’s deputy Letitia de Rio, turns out to be Pam’s half-sister. Getting their act together again, Jack and Letty build an impressive case against Nicky. But when California Fire and Life finally confronts Nicky, Jack suddenly realizes he’s been caught in as sweet a scam as he’s ever seen, with no way to avoid going down in flames (oops). Though Winslow (The Death and Life of Bobby Z, 1997, etc.) writes as crudely as he puns, his plotting is shapely and inventive, and most readers will get caught up in the tale of Jack’s treacherous descent into hot water and his miraculous escape. The whole story reads like a house afire—a real barn-burner. (First printing of 60,000)

Pub Date: July 8, 1999

ISBN: 0-679-45431-4

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2000

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A LITTLE LIFE

The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.

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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

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THE CATCHER IN THE RYE

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

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