An often entertaining caper that mixes high art and low criminality.
Three young would-be art forgers get in over their heads in this debut crime novel.
In 1990 Toronto, 20-year-old art student Marty Ronan is roommates with Howie Harrington, a transplanted British DJ who lives off the wealth of his investment banker father. The two men, along with Marty’s shady childhood friend Matt Babcock, throw illegal parties and make a decent amount of cash doing it. Then, one morning, a hungover Marty reads about the astronomical price tag of a Van Gogh painting in the New York Times and comes up with an idea: What if he and his friends forged a stolen painting and sold it on the black market? “It’s as much about choosing the right pigeon as it is about producing a passable forgery,” Marty explains to the others. “We don’t explain how we got it. We don’t have to. We present it as a stolen work of art to a dealer or collector willing to buy it anyway.” While scanning recent issues of a magazine dedicated to art thefts, Marty comes across the perfect piece to fake—a large-scale pastel drawing by Pablo Picasso that was stolen 16 years earlier and has yet to resurface. Through Howie, they find a suitable mark in a New York City investment banker who seems like he might be willing to purchase a hot artwork. Things get complicated, however, when Marty and Matt reconnect with Hamilton, Ontario–based gangsters. Marty’s father had previous run numbers for a man named Frank Piccolo, and Matt’s father, one of Frank’s enforcers, was murdered when Matt was only 15. But Matt and Marty will have to learn to keep old emotions at bay in order to pull off a $2.4 million deal. Kelly’s prose is full of detail and personality, and he keenly captures the attitude of his slacker criminal mastermind Marty. For example, as the artist begins his forgery, he narrates, “There was a lot I didn’t know...but if I waited until I felt I knew everything I knew I’d never start. And besides, if I couldn’t hack the pastels it wouldn’t matter if I knew everything there was to know or not.” That said, Marty and his friends often feel more like characters in a heist-movie screenplay than criminals that one might read about in the pages of a newspaper—they spend their days watching Martin Scorsese movies and their nights playing with guns and beautiful women. However, their milieu is specific and unusual enough to hold the reader’s interest. The author sometimes seems to get a bit too distracted by the minutiae of his settings—as when he spends a paragraph explaining exactly which streets the entrances to a college library face. Still, he manages to summon the environs of greater Toronto in a memorable manner. Nothing about this novel is terribly realistic, but it should satisfy readers for whom a clever criminal enterprise is just as impressive as a Picasso pastel.
An often entertaining caper that mixes high art and low criminality.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 295
Publisher: Kurti Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Less bleak than the subject matter might warrant—Hannah’s default outlook is sunny—but still, a wrenching depiction of war’s...
The traumatic homecoming of a wounded warrior.
The daughter of alcoholics who left her orphaned at 17, Jolene “Jo” Zarkades found her first stable family in the military: She’s served over two decades, first in the army, later with the National Guard. A helicopter pilot stationed near Seattle, Jo copes as competently at home, raising two daughters, Betsy and Lulu, while trying to dismiss her husband Michael’s increasing emotional distance. Jo’s mettle is sorely tested when Michael informs her flatly that he no longer loves her. Four-year-old Lulu clamors for attention while preteen Betsy, mean-girl-in-training, dismisses as dweeby her former best friend, Seth, son of Jo’s confidante and fellow pilot, Tami. Amid these challenges comes the ultimate one: Jo and Tami are deployed to Iraq. Michael, with the help of his mother, has to take over the household duties, and he rapidly learns that parenting is much harder than his wife made it look. As Michael prepares to defend a PTSD-afflicted veteran charged with Murder I for killing his wife during a dissociative blackout, he begins to understand what Jolene is facing and to revisit his true feelings for her. When her helicopter is shot down under insurgent fire, Jo rescues Tami from the wreck, but a young crewman is killed. Tami remains in a coma and Jo, whose leg has been amputated, returns home to a difficult rehabilitation on several fronts. Her nightmares in which she relives the crash and other horrors she witnessed, and her pain, have turned Jo into a person her daughters now fear (which in the case of bratty Betsy may not be such a bad thing). Jo can't forgive Michael for his rash words. Worse, she is beginning to remind Michael more and more of his homicide client. Characterization can be cursory: Michael’s earlier callousness, left largely unexplained, undercuts the pathos of his later change of heart.
Less bleak than the subject matter might warrant—Hannah’s default outlook is sunny—but still, a wrenching depiction of war’s aftermath.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-312-57720-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2012
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.
Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.
Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s (I Found You, 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5464-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
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