Intelligent and chilling.
This novel lays bare the mind of a sociopath whose accomplishments, normal life, and respected position disguise his true nature.
At 34, cardiologist Jeremy Balint is the youngest head of any medical division at his hospital. Married and the father of two daughters, his princesses, whose welfare he values above all else, Balint is stunned to find evidence of his wife Amanda’s infidelity with Warren Sugarman, a hospital colleague. Amanda handles every practical detail of household management on top of her nearly full-time job, and Balint doesn’t know how to manage life without her. As an adult, he’s always done right. Now, he realizes, “playing by the rules was for losers.” If he could murder Sugarman without getting caught, he would—and why should an intelligent man like him get caught? Balint develops a careful plan, designed to ensure getting away with murder, that will entail multiple victims. To further settle the score, he pursues an affair with a beautiful nursing student. Over months, Balint makes his preparations, murders victims, and enjoys his affair. Meanwhile, his career—and his reputation as an ethical man—grows. He feels no guilt; after all, he’s safeguarding his daughters’ futures. But Balint’s actions affect his marriage in a way he doesn’t expect, and the novel ends with a hint that his mask has slipped. Appel (The Topless Widow of Herkimer Street, 2016, etc.), a physician, attorney, and bioethicist, avoids glamorizing his sociopath or wallowing in blood-bath crimes. Instead, this is a thoughtful, subtle dissection of how a certain kind of sociopath, found “in the highest echelons of power,” operates. Perhaps what Appel does most interestingly is to show how Balint fails to understand himself or how others see him. He’s astonished to learn that everyone at the hospital knows of his affair; he believes he loves his daughters, but it’s clear they’re only narcissistic extensions, “the guardians of his image after his death. Balint had “lived his entire adult life as an upstanding citizen”— but a horrifying event from his childhood reveals this line to be self-justifying spin.
Intelligent and chilling.Pub Date: March 31, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-57962-495-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Permanent Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2017
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
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
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