A fast-paced, tangled mystery with an eerie sci-fi twist.
Crime drama meets sci-fi mayhem in Chloe’s (No Last Tattoo, 2013, etc.) haunting alien thriller.
Natt Whitehall is no stranger to alien life forms—he’s conducted extensive scientific research on the subject—but he finds himself helplessly looking on as his innocent sandwich run turns into an otherworldly nightmare at just after 9:30 on a dark night in Los Angeles. As Natt walks down the street, a mysterious teenage boy plunges pointy objects into the necks of two dark, hooded creatures before departing from the scene. Natt’s frantic 911 call summons the unflappable Gina O’Neill, an FBI agent and former lover with a formidable talent for solving crimes. Together, Natt and O’Neill embark on an investigation into a strange series of attacks that have resulted in skinned human bodies washing up on the shores of Malibu. The investigation leads them to Ziarre, the strange, deeply troubled owner of a car seen at the crime scene, and her grandfather Christian Donaldson. As Ziarre’s story unfolds, so does the dark history of the U.S. government’s involvement with a synthetically engineered breed of aliens known as bio-soldiers. Complicated by the presence of Ziarre’s sinister boss, Joe Evans, the plot unfolds in a heart-stopping web of drugs, sex, violence—and one young woman’s painful trail of self-discovery. Chloe’s writing is alive with detail—brand-name pizza receives just as much attention as alien attacks, and the result is a rare sense of verisimilitude that makes the presence of aliens in modern-day California feel all the more real and chilling. The action unfolds quickly, but Chloe’s tendency to give blow-by-blow descriptions of minor movements can make even sex scenes and alien onslaughts feel belabored and somewhat slow. The rapid shifts in time and point of view can feel haphazard and abrupt, too, and it takes a careful reader to follow the twists and turns of the complex yet compelling plot.
A fast-paced, tangled mystery with an eerie sci-fi twist.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-1452578743
Page Count: 112
Publisher: BalboaPress
Review Posted Online: Nov. 22, 2013
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
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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