A crafty, lightweight mystery anchored by a fearless female sleuth and lively supporting characters.
An economic collapse drives a hedge fund manager to murderous desperation while a police detective races to break the case before the body count rises in this intricately plotted mystery thriller.
When the titular envelope containing a sheet of paper with a bloody handprint and the word “JOSH” scribbled on it arrives in the mail, veteran psychologist Tonya Proctor and her husband Josh, a biomedical engineer, panic. Enter tough, seasoned Memphis police lieutenant Julia Todd, who, together with precinct secretary Teresa Johnson, swiftly pieces together the case. The investigation soon reveals that other medical scientists have received the same chartreuse calling card—before perishing in suspicious “accidents.” Todd’s investigation of a missing scientist pits her against Frederick Durnst, the CEO of BP Tech, who is less than forthcoming with company information. Todd sifts through a variety of leads as more local scientists go missing, Josh receives anonymous warnings and envelopes continue popping up around town. Fingerprints on Josh’s mysterious envelope match those of Carl Huong, a senior scientist at a company developing advanced (and controversial) joint replacement equipment, but Huong ends up murdered. Did he have compromising knowledge or was he just in the killer’s way? Complementing the narrative is a subplot involving Charleze Washington, a former foster child turned obsessive, aggressive financial hedge fund manager who finds herself knee-deep in an insider trading scam. The conventional sleuthing is engaging (though Paavola’s steady introduction of new characters becomes a bit distracting), with dangerous, illegal stock activity; cryptic e-mails; troublemakers; hit men and Josh, whose life remains in danger as everyone around him tries to piece together the clues. Paavola, a practicing Tennessee psychologist, keeps the action coming and his characters consistently interesting, though the conclusion isn’t nearly as satisfying as the search for clues.
A crafty, lightweight mystery anchored by a fearless female sleuth and lively supporting characters.Pub Date: June 11, 2010
ISBN: 978-0579057902
Page Count: 304
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
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