A gripping but overly contrived story of corruption and deception.
Following a botched attempt to defuse an escalating hostage crisis, three men, each with his own hidden agenda, are held captive in a room together in Friesen’s debut novel.
American attorney Dave Bigelow is in Mexico City to perform a routine bank audit when he swears he sees his New Yorker brother, Bob, stepping out of a bank. Dave chalks it up to a case of mistaken identity and goes on with his day. However, it was Bob, who’s in the city to deliver a briefcase of ransom money in exchange for Demir Ozmen, a fellow Ottoman Trading Company employee who’s being held captive by a Mexican drug cartel. Meanwhile, a rival cartel raids a church in the midst of a wedding and starts killing attendees one by one, saying that they’ll continue to do so until the other cartel releases Ozmen. When Dave sees Bob again in a crowded restaurant, he knows that he is, in fact, his sibling. Dave pursues him when he leaves the restaurant, and men abduct them both and throw them into a room with Ozmen. As the hours tick by, the captives attempt to determine why each of them is being held prisoner and try to figure out a means of escape. The author soon brings other characters into the mix—politicians, businessmen, professors, drug runners—and, as true allegiances are revealed, the mystery becomes more complex. Later, characters travel the globe, from Mexico to Turkey to Greece to Canada. Overall, Friesen delivers an often thrilling tale, and he makes sure that no one gets away clean as the story hurtles toward an inevitable, tragic conclusion. That said, the main characters seem to always be in exactly the right place at exactly the right time. The narrative tries to justify such fortuitous encounters by attributing them to fate. However, Friesen never earnestly explores this notion, so readers may find these occurrences to be a little too convenient to be believable.
A gripping but overly contrived story of corruption and deception.Pub Date: June 20, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-984522-63-4
Page Count: 318
Publisher: XlibrisUS
Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2018
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
