An excellent police thriller from a new talent.
This boisterous cop drama set in Boston’s troubled Tremont neighborhood offers more than the usual mix of corruption, organized crime and paranoiac plot twists.
A prostitute lies dead in a cheap motel in a bad part of town. Her suspected killer—a city policeman—is hauled away amid the glare of the local press. It all looks clear enough for everyone except young, streetwise Officer Ben Grasso (and perhaps Dennis Lehane fans), who begins his own covert investigation into the increasingly convoluted situation. He knows his childhood buddy Andy McGill is being framed for the shooting, but by whom? And why? Grasso’s knockout new partner—nightstick-wielding ex-Israeli intelligence agent Dina Greenbaum—joins in the search for the real story behind the young working girl’s murder, which leads them deep into a fairly predictable but entertaining tangle of organized crime and police corruption. Secret alliances, rogue bikers and a shadowy figure named Frank Ferrante complicate the pursuit of truth, as does a problematic romance that threatens to bubble up between Officers Grasso and Greenbaum. Hidden agendas are the order of the day, along with baseball, shootouts, familial responsibility and explosions. With these elements firmly in hand, the author turns out a more-than-competent thriller sure to please genre aficionados who like their crime fiction fast-paced, but not too broody or cerebral. Collins’ heroes and villains are comfortably life-sized, and his flair for interesting details of time and place keep the prose realistic but not dull. What helps elevate Collins’ debut from similar fare are his intriguing (but not belabored) digressions into his protagonists’ compelling back stories: Grasso’s ongoing balancing act between idealism and pragmatism rings true, without veering needlessly into chest-thumping machismo or blue-collar bathos, while Greenbaum’s mysterious doings with the Mossad are taut enough to be a self-contained tale. Readers rooting for further adventures from the duo will welcome the novel’s tidy, open-ended finale, which suggests the beginning of a potentially popular series.
An excellent police thriller from a new talent.Pub Date: April 17, 2012
ISBN: 978-1475146882
Page Count: 256
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2012
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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