A gripping but convoluted The Most Dangerous Game meets The Island of Doctor Moreau.
In this debut thriller, a hiker who discovers caged endangered animals becomes trapped himself.
Adirondack backpacker Basil “Baz” Billings is trespassing when he enters a cave and climbs down into a cavern lit by electric lights. From the cavern, he descends further to a series of rooms containing a breeding operation for endangered animals. Baz, who realizes the setup isn’t legit, emerges from the cave to find two men greeting him with shotguns. The pair walk Baz to a luxurious home nearby and throw him in a cage until the “master of the house,” Don Emile, returns. When he does, he suggests Baz join his crew and help breed endangered animals to transport to his private island—“his own personal Madagascar.” Baz rejects the offer. It’s back to the cage for him. He escapes his cell, but before leaving the house, he spies a computer screen displaying detailed information about him and his girlfriend, Jules. He finds additional files he thinks are suspicious before Emile’s toadies catch him. It’s round three in the cage (why don’t they just shoot him?). Baz’s escape attempts are heart-pounding. Hunted through the forest by former captors, the chase ends dramatically, and efforts to involve the cops prove futile. When the FBI gets involved, it appears that the documents on Emile’s computer are linked to several recent suspicious deaths. In retaliation for involving the FBI, Emile’s posse tries to kill Baz and Jules. And it won’t be the last time Baz is in the cross hairs. Threading through the action are soul-lifting descriptions of nature, such as the lusty scents of flowers and the beauty of glossy capped reishi and colorful turkey tail mushrooms. The relationship between Jules and Baz and their individual back stories are highlights, but caging Baz repeatedly grows tiresome, and the elaborateness of Emile’s plans strain credulity.
A gripping but convoluted The Most Dangerous Game meets The Island of Doctor Moreau.Pub Date: March 24, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5144-5670-5
Page Count: 198
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: Oct. 11, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
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