Entertaining and insightful crime stories.
In this follow-up collection, Dean (Cruel and Unusual, 2017, etc.) delivers four speculative tales centered on a near future American criminal justice system and its harrowing outcomes.
The book kicks off with “Dummy,” which follows two auto mechanics, Robert Holman and Juan Ortega, who are hoping for a relaxing night of drinks. They drive home drunk, resulting in an accident that kills an innocent woman; one of the men survives and goes on trial for vehicular homicide, among other charges, and if convicted, he’ll face a truly startling punishment. Indeed, all four of these Arizona-set stories showcase new, offbeat ways to render judgment. In “Early Release,” inmate Kelvin Heyer, a lifer, has a chance to get out of prison, but thanks to the Victims’ Rights Amendment, the family of the man he killed during a botched bank robbery gets to hunt him for 24 hours. Like all the stories here, this one offers multilayered characters; although Heyer is the one serving time for murder, it’s the vengeful, homicidal family members who come across as villains. In “Public Pool,” Luis Ortiz and Carlos Noriega’s small company wins a bid to build eight new swimming pools in Phoenix; a competitor’s attempt to pilfer their business leads to blackmail and murder—as well as a very curious method for extracting a confession. A woman fights a traffic ticket in “Broken Justice” and learns that the cutting-edge, automated “courtroom pods” may have terrifying flaws. Each story is swiftly paced; in the aforementioned “Early Release,” for instance, the protagonist spends much of the narrative on the run. But Dean’s stories also provide profound critical assessments of capital punishment—executions are expedited, or broadcast on the Justice Department’s website. They also offer critiques on contemporary technology; “Public Pool,” for instance, makes it clear that people should be very wary of what they include in texts.
Entertaining and insightful crime stories.Pub Date: Oct. 16, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-72886-349-8
Page Count: 348
Publisher: Time Tunnel Media
Review Posted Online: Dec. 10, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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