A deft, elegantly written tour de force.
Debut thriller about the looting of a Federal Reserve Bank by thieves both morally irredeemable and close to irresistible.
Start with Paul Eamon Devine, a well-respected 40-something Federal District Court judge in Chicago. Paulie is a judge with a grudge. He bitterly hates Redding Prindiville, the newly named president of the Chicago Fed, blaming Prindiville’s venomous double-dealing, in part at least, for the untimely death of Paulie's beloved wife. Revenge fantasies crowd and cloud his mind, until one day he conceives what he considers the perfect get-even scheme. He'll rob Prindiville's bank, not so much for the money (though $100-million is an intriguing extra) as for the humiliation that will accrue to an arrogant, pretentious, ice-hearted spawn of Iago. The idea takes root, flourishes, refuses to be dislodged, and Paulie realizes that almost despite himself he's allowed it to become richly detailed. But he knows he can't do the heist by himself; he needs three accomplices. Paulie begins the recruiting process with his oldest and best friend, unflappable, absolutely devoted hero-firefighter Dave Brody. Chastity Scott comes next: she's a guard at the Fed, and Paulie senses in this resourceful former army officer the kind of resolution against which panic will beat its wings fruitlessly. He's right about Chastity but fatally wrong about her husband Trimble, his third recruit and the team's weakest link. It's panicky Trimble who breaks ranks and allows smart, ambitious Tony Plymouth to get a whiff of the conspiracy. And because Plymouth is the most relentless police officer since Inspector Javert, the team is forced to dodge and weave defensively, contemplating counter-measures that once would—and certainly should— have appalled them. Zagel, himself once a Federal District Court judge, obviously knows his settings, and he’s also managed to create an engaging cast of scoundrels who deserve disapproval but probably won't get it.
A deft, elegantly written tour de force.Pub Date: June 10, 2002
ISBN: 0-399-14891-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2002
Although the author acknowledges in a postscript that his story is perhaps “too episodic,” his life of Sam Hell is inspiring...
Quite a departure from Dugoni’s dark novels about Detective Tracy Crosswhite (The Trapped Girl, 2017, etc.): the frankly inspirational tale of a boy who overcomes the tremendous obstacles occasioned by the color of his eyes.
Samuel James Hill is born with ocular albinism, a rare condition that makes his eyes red. Dubbed “the devil boy” by his classmates at Our Lady of Mercy, the Catholic school his mother, Madeline, fights to get him into, he faces loneliness, alienation, and daily ridicule, especially from David Freemon, a merciless bully who keeps finding new ways to torment him, and Sister Beatrice, the school’s principal and Freemon’s enabler, who in her own subtler ways is every bit as vindictive as he is. Only the friendship of two other outsiders, African-American athlete Ernie Cantwell and free-spirited nonconformist Michaela Kennedy, allows him to survive his trying years at OLM. In high school, Sam finds that nearly every routine milestone—the tryouts for the basketball team, the senior prom, the naming of the class valedictorian—represents new challenges. Even Sam’s graduation is blasted by a new crisis, though this one isn’t rooted in his red eyes. Determined to escape from the Bay Area suburb of Burlingame, he finds himself meeting the same problems, often embodied in the very same people, over and over. Yet although he rejects his mother’s unwavering faith in divine providence, he triumphs in the end by recognizing himself in other people and assuming the roles of the friends and mentors who helped bring him to adulthood. Dugoni throws in everything but a pilgrimage to Lourdes, and then adds that trip as well.
Although the author acknowledges in a postscript that his story is perhaps “too episodic,” his life of Sam Hell is inspiring and aglow with the promise of redemption.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5039-4900-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Lake Union Publishing
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
A contemporary equivalent of This Side of Paradise or Vile Bodies, and another solid building-block in one of contemporary...
A first US appearance of a novel originally published in 1987, this crisp portrayal of “flaming youth” in the late 1960s proves one of Murakami’s most appealing—if uncharacteristic—books.
Best known to us as the comic surrealist-symbolist author of such rousing postmodernist fare as A Wild Sheep Chase (1989), Murakami is also a highly intelligent romantic who feels the pangs of his protagonist Toru Watanabe’s insistent sexual and intellectual hungers and renders them with unsparing clarity (the matter-of-fact sexual frankness here seems unusual for a Japanese novel, even a 1987 one).Toru’s narrative of his student years, lived out against a backdrop of ongoing “campus riots,” focuses on the lessons he learns from relationships with several highly individual characters, two of them women he simultaneously loves (or thinks he loves). Mercurial Naoko, who clearly perceives the seeds of her own encroaching madness (“It’s like I’m split in two and playing tag with myself”), continues to tug away at Toru’s emotions even after she enters a sanatorium. Meanwhile, coy fellow student Midori tries to dispel shadows cast by her parents’ painful deaths by fantasizing and simulating—though never actually experiencing—sex with him. Other perspectives on Toru’s hard-won assumption of maturity are offered by older student Nagasawa (“a secret reader of classic novels,” and a compulsive seducer); Naoko’s roommate Reiko, a music teacher (and self-styled interpreter of such Beatles’ songs as the one that provides Murakami’s evocative title) who’s perhaps also her lesbian lover; and the specter of Toru’s boyhood friend Kizuki, a teenaged suicide. There’s a lot of talk about books (particularly Fitzgerald’s and Hesse’s) and other cultural topics, in a blithely discursive and meditative story that’s nevertheless firmly anchored to the here and now by the vibrant immediacy of its closely observed characters and their quite credibly conflicted psyches and libidos.
A contemporary equivalent of This Side of Paradise or Vile Bodies, and another solid building-block in one of contemporary fiction’s most energetic and impressive bodies of work.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-70402-7
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Vintage
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2000
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