A fine mystery with a strapping, enigmatic hero who’s capable of carrying his own series.
In Mahoney’s debut thriller, an Army vet visiting the family of a friend and fellow soldier becomes entangled in a story of murder and deceit.
Adrian Cervantes’ sole purpose for going to Cullinan, Washington, is to deliver money to the parents of his late friend Ricky Quinones. He shows up during a memorial service for Ricky’s father, Eric, where he has a brief conversation with the widow, Marie, which upset her. This sparks a response from a couple of townspeople, which results in a scuffle that ends with Adrian’s arrest. Attorney Virginia Hue helps him get out on bail, but he provides her with few details about himself. He’s an Army Ranger whose entire squad, including Ricky, died in Iraq, and this experience is connected to the aforementioned money that Adrian feels Marie is “due”—although he’s initially mum about where it came from. He believes that Marie’s reluctance to accept the cash stems from her suspicions about Eric, who’d been responsible for a local mill’s missing pension funds. Accordingly, Adrian looks into Eric’s demise and decides that it wasn’t an accident—he was murdered. Meanwhile, a dangerous man named Frank Gaulder is willing to kill to keep the snooping veteran from drawing unwanted attention to Cullinan. Mahoney’s tale thrives on the mysteries that surround its characters, including those regarding the specifics of Adrian’s Iraq experience, the money, and Frank’s nefarious deeds. The story also showcases Adrian’s considerable skills, particularly his aptitude for stealth. For example, Mahoney meticulously describes the protagonist’s slow, patient work as he attempts to open a door that’s secured with a card reader. Although Frank and his few henchmen prove menacing, they’re largely one-dimensional; Virginia, however, is a dynamic, savvy character whose own investigation into Eric’s death expands upon the standard attorney-client relationship.
A fine mystery with a strapping, enigmatic hero who’s capable of carrying his own series.Pub Date: Dec. 6, 2018
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Time Tunnel Media
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2019
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
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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