An intricate, lively detective novel with a wink.
An aspiring lawyer scrapes together a living as a Renaissance man and amateur sleuth in Rieger’s witty debut.
Roderick Misely has dreams of joining the legal profession, but his father’s tarnished name has prevented any of the lawyers in the 1950s town of Elk Neck from taking him on as an apprentice. So Misely does whatever he can to skirt as close to the legal profession as possible as an all-purpose consultant. Chasing down lost dogs for the reward and taking on menial typing jobs with the municipal government are only a few of the tasks that keep a can of stew on his hot plate or enough change in his pocket for a meal at the local Greek restaurant. His specialty, however, is solving seemingly unsolvable mysteries, from the theft of expensive jewels at the local museum to the blackmail of a town official. Sometimes, Roderick acts at the request of a desperate client, but other times he hangs his hopes on meddling without invitation of a possible payday. Each chapter is a glimpse into one of those cases and the variety of creative but legally fuzzy methods that Roderick employs to crack them. These bite-sized whodunits toe the line between the zany and dangerous without reading over-the-top—a savvy mixture from which even more seasoned writers could learn a thing or two. All the while, Rieger’s writing is effortlessly funny, with deadpan humor coloring even the most mundane moments: “The two shook hands. Misely could have sworn he was handling a live, wet eel. Instinctively, he looked around for a towel, but of course, there was no towel.” Roderick himself is fairly humorless but is nonetheless a refreshing take on the 1950s gumshoe. He’s a smooth talker and skillful investigator, with none of the cool glamor or idealized independence of some other fictional private eyes. Eschewing friends, he’s certainly out for himself, but his freedom comes with a healthy dose of reality. Life hasn’t turned out the way he expected; he struggles to make ends meet and sleeps on a cot in his cluttered “eyesore” of a suite. Clever and comical, this page-turner will have readers furrowing their brows one minute and laughing out loud the next.
An intricate, lively detective novel with a wink.Pub Date: April 25, 2013
ISBN: 978-1593308186
Page Count: 342
Publisher: Aventine Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 18, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2014
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
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
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