An entertaining, uncomplicated whodunit seasoned with a likable hero and a bucolic sense of place.
In this mystery, a murder along the Cuyamaca Mountains in San Diego, Calif., pits a dedicated forest ranger against a host of shady villains.
Chris Becker, chief ranger at Cuyamaca State Park, has been a single father since his wife, Lori, abandoned him and their young daughter, Alicia, more than a decade ago. His work solving a rash of car thefts in the park is nothing compared to the discovery of a mutilated body on picturesque Azalea Trail, a hiking path canopied in pine chaparral. Becker jumps on the case, pondering whether the bite marks covering the corpse are indeed from the suspected wild cougar or something else, since there were no animal hairs found at the scene. Meanwhile, Alicia braces for her freshman year at university, and her father must deal with his reservations about having his only child out on her own. Once the mystery deepens into murder, Becker investigates the crime further to uncover foul play. The victim, Xavier Hess, turns out to be a local businessman who was hiding marital infidelity. As the clues mount—some provided by Becker’s observant daughter—Becker pieces together inconsistent forensic data and busily sifts through the suspects, including angry alcoholic and local environmental protectionist Ollie Mahlon. The resultant web of bad blood and discoveries of secret tunnels and stolen artifacts propel the novel toward a suspenseful, satisfying denouement. After all the twists and turns, Becker, who proves himself a thoroughly capable ranger and father throughout the novel, solves the case in 10 remarkable days. Some of the prose is rickety—Becker’s disappointment at sleeping alone is described as “at least thermally less difficult”—but father-daughter writing duo Picard and Picard Gorham supplement their mystery with Alicia’s believable pre-college jitters, the flourishing relationship with her father, and interesting facts and information on forestry and archaeology.
An entertaining, uncomplicated whodunit seasoned with a likable hero and a bucolic sense of place.Pub Date: Aug. 10, 2013
ISBN: 978-0615861173
Page Count: 290
Publisher: Workshop For Writers Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 10, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2014
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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