An underdeveloped thriller with a protagonist that could have been fleshed out more.
A veteran homeland-security agent vows justice in the mysterious death of a young auditor investigating the plagued production of a Pentagon fighter jet in this thriller.
Ohio-based cost analyst Ann Redmond, an eager new hire working for the U.S. Department of Defense, is sent to Launch Weapons Systems in California to audit the progress of a $400 billion F-35 Lightning II fighter-jet project. There are concerns that the manufacturer is lagging behind its delivery schedule and will miss an upcoming live weapons test. It seems like a simple assignment, which makes her lurid murder all the more shocking and suspect. Agent Sam Pruett, “in the twilight of his career,” allows himself to become personally involved in the case and is “determined to see it through to its ominous conclusion.” That conclusion, though, will likely be obvious to the reader; the title of the book is a mild spoiler in itself. But by the time Pruett sorts it all out, there are still more than 100 pages to go. Bronsen’s debut is several undeveloped books in one. The focus initially is on the financial dilemma of Jay Forest, a recently fired avionics worker who’s tens of thousands of dollars in debt to a loan shark who figures prominently in the story’s early going, only to unceremoniously disappear mid-book. Then a former colleague, who runs Launch Weapons Systems, hires Jay to get the jet project on track and he’s charged to put a team together. The sections dealing with the fighter jet’s production and the technology behind it are the most credible in the book, and they’ll please tech-heads. Another subplot involves a struggling, family-owned company that resorts to unscrupulous methods to try to wrest the F-35 project from Launch Weapons Systems. The “open-and-shut” murder case, though, doesn’t generate much suspense or reader engagement, and it’s not even clear why Pruett is so invested in this particular case. His antagonistic working relationship with a local police detective (a more impressive sleuth) at first suggests a mismatched-buddy relationship. Fortunately, Bronsen does avoid this cliché, but the dialogue throughout is still trite.
An underdeveloped thriller with a protagonist that could have been fleshed out more.Pub Date: March 22, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5188-9276-9
Page Count: 340
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
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
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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