Treasure hunters face plenty of hurdles in this entertaining, suspenseful tale.
In this thriller, a Virginia lawyer’s desperate search for a missing lottery ticket worth millions puts his estranged wife and others in danger.
Attorney Channing Booker has just won the lottery, which is a massive $241 million before taxes. But he’s not ready to celebrate just yet. He knows a divorce from his wife, Susan, is imminent, and he doesn’t want to split the fortune. He’ll report the win later with his lawyer friend’s assistance, stashing his ticket in one of Susan’s rare Charles Dickens books. But Channing returns home the next day to find Susan gone, along with some furniture and every Dickens novel. Susan has good reason to leave: Channing, a gambler and habitual drug user, has been physically abusing her. That she’s completely unaware of the ticket doesn’t stop Channing’s hunt for the books. Keeping mum about the valuable bookmark, he enlists the help of loathsome pawn shop owner Billy Scaggs and contends with a nosy attorney at his firm, who assumes Channing is up to something shady. Meanwhile, a sudden car accident threatens to derail Susan’s escape plans. And as Channing’s 180-day period for turning in his ticket gradually diminishes, his despair may escalate into violence. Shackelford (Judges Say the Darndest Things, 2004) provides his story with a dizzying tempo, as he piles on various obstacles for both Channing and Susan. There are perspectives from multiple characters, but they primarily shift between the estranged couple and Lee Barnett, a retired detective who somehow secures evidence of the lottery ticket’s existence. Characters throughout are notable, as even seemingly minor players have solid backstories. But the most indelible are Billy, who’s frighteningly good at tracking down information, and Lee, a flawed potential hero whose pursuit of the ticket involves theft and breaking and entering. The author’s breezy prose is free of obscenities and graphic specifics of brutality, including during the intense final act. Although the inevitable encounter involving the main characters results in a well-earned climax, a romance between two of the players is short and somewhat contrived.
Treasure hunters face plenty of hurdles in this entertaining, suspenseful tale.Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-64437-009-4
Page Count: 252
Publisher: Black Opal Books
Review Posted Online: May 29, 2019
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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