Like John Grisham and Paul Levine, Grippando wastes precious little time or thrills on the courtroom in his ballyhooed first novel, a high-concept legal thriller. Two years ago, law-and-order Florida Governor Harry Swyteck rejected estranged son Jack's last-minute plea for a pardon for his client Raul Fernandez, even though Jack swore he'd been visited by a mysterious masked man who presented irrefutable proof that Fernandez was innocent of the sex killing he was charged with. Now a diabolically clever killer—the same masked man?—has planned a meticulous series of crimes with one end in view: to get Jack unjustly convicted of murder so that his father will have to sign his death warrant. Both father and son suspect that Eddy Goss, the despised ``Chrysanthemum Killer'' Jack got off on a technicality, is the man who's been setting them up, blackmailing the governor about his refusal to pardon Fernandez and threatening Jack, his girlfriend Cindy Paige, and her old roommate Gina Teresi. But when Goss turns up dead, both men realize that the killer, who lured them into separate trips to Goss's seedy apartment just in time to puncture their alibis, is playing a deeper game. In less time than you can say frameup, Jack is indicted for Goss's murder. Should he call Gina to testify that he was writhing in her bed for most of that night? Every time it seems that matters can't get any worse for Jack, the killer has another trick up his sleeve, and Harry's efforts to clear his son only get them both into graver peril. Crude but sensationally effective, a Perils of Pauline cliffhanger for two male leads in which the stupidity of the innocent gives a playful kick to the penny-dreadful horrors. It won't kill more than a few hours, but oh, what hours they'll be. (First printing of 75,000; Literary Guild/Mystery Guild alternate selections; $100,000 ad/promo; author tour)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-06-017782-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1994
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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