A quick, descriptive baseball-themed thriller that gets a few strikes for reducing its main character to supporting status.
In Randall’s (12th Man for Death, 2012 etc.) latest thriller, a private eye’s attempt to bring a Cuban baseball player’s family to the United States mushrooms into an adventure involving diamond smuggling and gunrunning.
Star Cuban right fielder Toribo “Toro” Rodriquez defected to the United States to play in the major leagues. His family was supposed to come with him, but a last-second snafu left them behind. Years later, Rodriquez, now an established American star, enlists the aid of tough private investigator Sharon O’Mara to get his family out of Cuba and bring them to America. Meanwhile, O’Mara’s close friend, Kevin Bryan, goes to London to help with security for a major diamond shipment. The two cases dovetail when several Cubans, including the man watching Rodriquez’s family and a baseball team manager, steal the diamonds, and turn out to be involved with a gun-smuggling operation. After a double cross, one of the Cubans, a coldblooded killer named Marta de la Vega, comes to America to get revenge on the man who tricked her—and she heads straight into O’Mara and Bryan’s path. The author obviously knows Cuba well, and his descriptions will immerse readers in that country’s culture: “The men in guayaberas were leathery and dark, most younger by half than the Detroit steel they drove.” The story contains some flashback sequences of O’Mara’s time in Iraq, and here again, Randall is on firm ground: “Aleppo boil was…a fleabite–induced bug that could disfigure you for life, and even kill you slowly if not treated.” The story moves swiftly, with no extraneous subplots slowing the narrative drive. However, it doesn’t have a lot of surprises, and it unfortunately focuses as much on Bryan as it does on O’Mara. He’s a weaker and much less intriguing character, and the byplay between him and a British secret service agent, with its comparisons of America and Britain, is clichéd and quickly grows tiresome. As this book is part of the Sharon O’Mara Chronicles, she should have been its star pitcher—not a pinch hitter.
A quick, descriptive baseball-themed thriller that gets a few strikes for reducing its main character to supporting status.Pub Date: Dec. 26, 2014
ISBN: 978-0965651066
Page Count: 298
Publisher: Windsor Hill Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 25, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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