Matteson’s grisly thriller gives the attorney-client relationship a bad name.
Bradley “Hound Dog” Hunt, once a prosperous corporate lawyer, began representing “the most guilty and despicable clients” after his son was killed by a drunk driver in a hit-and-run. Hunt’s clients always walk free, and, soon after they do, Hunt tracks them down and kills them. Revealing Hunt’s secret doesn’t ruin any surprises for the reader because the central question posed by Matteson’s novel is not who murdered Hunt’s clients. It’s not even whether Hunt will be discovered. Rather, the novel probes what the FBI agents on Hunt’s tail will do when they inevitably connect the dots in his crimes, and whether the lonely librarian who becomes besotted with Hunt will remain interested once she discovers the violent truth. The novel opens with Hunt’s gruesome killing of a child pornographer and murderer. Before killing his client, Hunt helped him strike a deal with the federal government that placed him in the witness protection program. We then meet Frank Turbine and Nelson Lyman, the FBI agents assigned to the murder. Matteson alternates between Hunt’s lonely quest to avenge his son’s death, the agents’ investigation and the attractive librarian’s interest in Hunt, which is sparked when her son testifies as a witness during one of Hunt’s trials. The author successfully delivers suspense and surprises, and the novel moves back and forth between California and Pennsylvania at a breakneck pace. Unfortunately, the characters are not as well crafted as the plot. Matteson attempts to create unique characters, such as small-town sheriff Hannibal Johnson and Cherlene, Hunt’s loyal secretary, but in his efforts to make his characters vivid, he indulges a tendency to overwrite. For example, when Turbine drives Lyman down a country road, Matteson does not just write that Lyman “felt more like Tonto than he cared to admit and looked glumly out the window,” he adds that Lyman was “disturbed and confused, sharing only a quiet stoicism with his fictional Indian counterpart.” Similarly, it’s not enough for Lyman to habitually twirl a rubber band; Matteson spells out that in doing so, Lyman shows “his true, hyperkinetic nature.” Overwrought prose slows down an otherwise engrossing thriller.
Pub Date: Jan. 6, 2012
ISBN: 978-0615496436
Page Count: 330
Publisher: Croydon
Review Posted Online: Feb. 27, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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PERSPECTIVES
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