A whodunit with a solid premise, brought down by subpar writing and characterization.
A series of violent crimes in Boston casts suspicion on a group of friends in Kaplan’s debut mystery.
Keith Gallon, Larry Gallon, Dan Daniels, Sheryl Common, and Ben Freeman are core members of the Devil’s Jury, an informal social group that meets regularly for drinks, discussion, and a hearty dose of complaining. The group’s topics range from the broad (religion, politics, society) to the narrow (an endless local construction project that’s ruining everyone’s commutes). But the group’s casual venting seems more ominous after a worker is murdered at the construction site, apparently the victim of a sniper. Police detective Dahlia “Dizzy” Gillespie is on the case but struggles to find any leads. Soon, another subject of the group’s complaints winds up dead: greedy lawyer Carl Monroe, who made Larry’s divorce far lengthier, costlier, and angrier than it had to be. Assistant District Attorney Rob Latrobe teams up with Dizzy to investigate, which soon leads them to the Devil’s Jury, and they suspect that one or more of its members may be a killer. Meanwhile, the Jury struggles with its own internal strife, stemming from romantic complications among its members. After one of them dies and another disappears, Dizzy must follow the rest of the Devil’s Jury to find a possible murderer. The plot is an intriguing one, and both Rob and Dizzy are well-developed, likable characters; interludes featuring Rob and his sharp-witted wife, Kim, while technically unrelated to the plot, are sweetly written and enjoyable. The members of the titular Devil’s Jury, however, are less successfully drawn. Although the story provides background for each one of them, they remain indistinct enough that readers will find it easy to get them confused. The prose is often awkward and error-prone; the first chapter, for example, opens with the confusing line, “Some human activities go well, mean well, like the moon but can influence life, or even death,” and a later paragraph begins, “Dizzy helped Keith gather up his stuff, and subtly glancing through it.”
A whodunit with a solid premise, brought down by subpar writing and characterization.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4834-6017-8
Page Count: 182
Publisher: Lulu
Review Posted Online: Feb. 10, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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