Forget Grisham. Grippando works in the James Patterson mold: high concepts, simple characters, prefab thrills, turbo-charged...
A wild will turns its legatees into clay pigeons in Miami lawyer Jack Swyteck’s latest outing.
Sally Fenning’s luckless first marriage ended in poverty, divorce, and homicide: A masked man broke into her house, attacked her, and drowned her four-year-old daughter Katherine. Five years later, her second marriage seems to have gone a lot better; a cagey prenup and prudent investments have left her $46 million richer. So why does she contact a hit man and ask him to kill her? If she’s so devastated by Katherine’s murder, why has she waited five years? And why does the will she leaves behind after she’s shot to death on the freeway divide her entire estate among six people she didn’t even like, with the stipulation that the whole pot will go to the last survivor? As the would-be heirs—Sally’s ex Miguel Rios, his divorce lawyer Geraldo Colletti, Miami Tribune reporter Deirdre Meadows, assistant state attorney Mason Rudsky, small-time hoodlum Tatum Knight, and mysterious Alan Sirap—begin eyeing each other nervously, Swyteck (Beyond Suspicion, 2002, etc.), who wants nothing to do with the case, gets dragged into it by his best friend, Tatum’s brother Theo, who insists that his brother didn’t kill Sally, even though he’s the hit man she pitched her own death to. Jack spins his wheels interminably filing suit against Rudsky to force him to disclose files on Katherine’s unsolved murder and flying to the Ivory Coast to see Sally’s sister Rene, a pediatrician working with Children First, so it’s a good long time before the heirs predictably start to die and the fun (though not the logic, complexity, or surprise) begins.
Forget Grisham. Grippando works in the James Patterson mold: high concepts, simple characters, prefab thrills, turbo-charged pacing, and utterly forgettable twists and turns.Pub Date: July 8, 2003
ISBN: 0-06-000555-6
Page Count: 384
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2003
The Stand did less well than The Shining, and The Dead Zone will do less well than either—as the King of high horror (Carrie) continues to move away from the grand-gothic strain that once distinguished him from the other purveyors of psychic melodrama. Here he's taken on a political-suspense plot formula that others have done far better, giving it just the merest trappings of deviltry. Johnnie Smith of Cleaves Mills, Maine, is a super-psychic; after a four-year coma, he has woken up to find that he can see the future—all of it except for certain areas he calls the "dead zone." So Johnnie can do great things, like saving a friend from death-by-lightning or reuniting his doctor with long-lost relatives. But Johnnie also can see a horrible presidential candidate on the horizon. He's Mayor Gregory Aromas Stillson of Ridgeway, N.H., and only Johnnie knows that this apparently klutzy candidate is really the devil incarnate—that if Stillson is elected he'll become the new Hitler and plunge the world into atomic horror! What can Johnnie do? All he can do is try to assassinate this Satanic candidate—in a climactic shootout that is recycled and lackluster and not helped by King's clumsy social commentary (". . . it was as American as The Wonderful Worm of Disney"). Johnnie is a faceless hero, and never has King's banal, pulpy writing been so noticeable in its once-through-the-typewriter blather and carelessness. Yes, the King byline will ensure a sizeable turnout, but the word will soon get around that the author of Carrie has this time churned out a ho-hum dud.
Pub Date: Aug. 16, 1979
ISBN: 0451155750
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1979
A fine demonstration of the power and versatility of Glück’s verse, this volume will delight fans and intrigue newcomers.
Glück’s international reputation as an accomplished and critically acclaimed contemporary poet makes the arrival of her new volume an eagerly anticipated event. This slender collection meets these expectations with 44 poems that pull the reader into a realm of meditation and memory. She sets most of them in the heat of summer—a time of year when nature seems almost oppressively heavy with life—in order to meditate on the myriad realities posed by life and death. Glück mines common childhood images (a grandmother transforming summer fruit into a cool beverage, two sisters applying fingernail polish in a backyard) to resurrect the intense feelings that accompany awakening to the sensual promises of life, and she desperately explores these resonant images, searching for a path that might reconcile her to the inevitability of death. These musings produce the kinds of spiritual insights that draw so many readers to her work: she suggests that we perceive our experiences most intensely when tempered by memory, and that such experiences somehow provide meaning for our lives. Yet for all her metaphysical sensitivity and poetic craftsmanship, Glück reaffirms our ultimate fate: we all eventually die. Rather than resort to pithy mysticism or self-obsessive angst, she boldly insists that death creeps in the shadows of even our brightest summers. The genius of her poems lies in their ability to sear the summertime onto our souls in such a way that its “light will give us no peace.”
A fine demonstration of the power and versatility of Glück’s verse, this volume will delight fans and intrigue newcomers.Pub Date: April 9, 2001
ISBN: 0-06-018526-0
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
