Biographies are as telling as clues in this smartly written debut mystery set in California wine country.
Ghostwriter Charlie Teller ought to recognize a fall from grace when he sees one. Celebrities, artists and athletes who’d flown high only to crash and burn had been Charlie’s bread-and-butter, at least until personal scandal abruptly punctuated his own career and turned his marriage into a dangling modifier. But the murder of Santa Rosa restaurateur and health-club owner Paul Barkley requires deep background sleuthing, and Charlie has the chops for the job. He found the body, after all. Plus there’s that memory stick Paul passed to Charlie on the night of the murder, containing a mysterious spreadsheet, and it was Paul who introduced Charlie to Rajiv Patel, a construction mogul in search of a memoirist, on whose estate Teller now lives and writes. Local detective Eddie Mahler suspects Charlie has unauthorized dirt on Paul, and he’s not far off. Complicating the picture is Paul’s fiancée Page, a fitness instructor who may have private exercise plans for Charlie, and Kenny McDonald, reclusive ex–front man for a famed ’60s band and the local poster boy for lawyers, guns and money. When Charlie teams with a neo-bohemian masseuse from Paul’s health club and her former–Special Forces beau for some legwork, there will be blood. The brisk action gets interrupted by a series of digressions in which Charlie reflects on his past books. These are strong stories, with thoughtful accounts of the ghostwriter’s craft and the hazards of success and failure, but at times they feel too deep for this otherwise well-coiled suspense, especially when Teller’s richly drawn celebrity subjects threaten to eclipse the book’s main cast. Nonetheless, Weisel writes with aplomb and has solid grasp of the genre. A keen sense of redemption pervades, along with elegant echoes of Chandler and MacDonald. A sophisticated, literary whodunit that proves lives are harder to solve than crimes.
Pub Date: Oct. 24, 2011
ISBN: 978-1457506376
Page Count: 278
Publisher: Dog Ear Publishing
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
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