Koretsky’s care over the grim details of Amanda’s investigations does nothing to dull the edge of her puzzles, although in...
Child abuse investigator Koretsky, creator of the Dalton Keys thrillers (Blueprint, 2009, etc.), turns her hand to a subject near and dear to her in this trio of bruising novellas.
As an emergency response investigator for the Santa Isabel court system, Amanda Russo has seen human misery that almost defies description. In Mandated Reporter, former client Hilda Creede calls Amanda with a shocking claim that she’s just seen her teenage son, Cameron, sexually assaulting her younger son, Wharton. But a look into Cameron’s traumatic childhood reveals an unnerving sense of history repeating itself. The trauma in The Pink Balcony is more mental than physical. Reba Smithe runs away from the Halcyon House group home after being charged with stealing a valuable pin. But the more Amanda digs into Reba’s claim that the pin actually belonged to her mother, left over from the days when she partied in homes of the rich and famous, the more suspicious the investigator becomes of Halcyon’s owner, Dr. Baker, who brought the charges against Reba in the first place. Could Melinda, who brought Reba up in squalor, have owned such a fabulous jewel? Amanda also knows that abuse and neglect aren’t limited to the poor. In Grant’s Line, she searches for Roseann Cantrell, who disappeared from her family’s home after Pablo, the chauffeur, was shot to death. The Cantrells, who own Cantrell Pacific Lumber, write Roseann off: her mother, Elena, is too stoned to care and father Adam seems absorbed in the great family tragedy, in which his father, Hugh, murdered the man who killed Hugh’s father, Samuel. But can Roseann’s disappearance provide an alternate version of Samuel’s death?
Koretsky’s care over the grim details of Amanda’s investigations does nothing to dull the edge of her puzzles, although in one case, the end comes rather abruptly.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-58790-316-8
Page Count: 456
Publisher: Regent
Review Posted Online: Oct. 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
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
© 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.
