Mystery veteran Gorman (Blood Moon, p. 666, etc.) sprays hot lead from the hip in this punchy historical thriller about a wild race to claim the secret recordings of the Blondest Hollywood Babylonian. It's the early 1960s, and ultra-paranoid FBI top cop J. Edgar Hoover wants to politically geld Jack and Bobby Kennedy. With the reluctant aid of his devoted Renfield, Clyde Tolson, Hoover schemes to obtain Marilyn Monroe's surreptitiously recorded tapes of her illicit unions with Bobby, the newly appointed attorney general; thus leveraged against Washington's best, brightest, and randiest, the waningly relevant Hoover intends to extort a few more years of political currency from JFK, who also trysted with the iconic yet desperately insecure starlet. By the time the plot gets underway, Monroe's ``suicide'' has been discovered, but the coveted tapes have disappeared into the safe of a piggishly dissolute Hollywood magazine publisher. Hoover dispatches psycho-lesbian West Coast operative Melanie Baines, a sadistic moll with an appetite for torturing her victims, to track down the big prize, but the Kennedy boys and their ``associates'' in the Mob also commission agents to join the chase. As if that weren't enough, Gorman wedges fossilized gossip columnist Louella Parsons into the story (the exclusive she'll write on the tapes will resuscitate her moribund career), along with a failed screenwriter scrambling to rescue her kidnapped daughter. A host of colorful minor characters, many of whom come to gruesome ends during the course of Baines's take-no-prisoners investigation, are the icing on this plentifully layered fictional cake. Throughout, while shifting between Washington and Tinseltown, Gorman interrupts the furious action with excerpts from Monroe's personal tapes, adding a melancholy sketch of a woman on the verge to his gleefully trashy narrative. If it weren't for the sputtery conclusion, this could be Madonna's first TV movie. Deliciously slick.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-312-85646-6
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
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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