by Janet Kole ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 18, 2016
A witty tale with two retirees—a lawyer and a hit man—cleverly paralleled.
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A senior partner at a Philadelphia law firm, whose colleagues may be trying to push him out, collides with a professional assassin in this thriller.
When two of Jack Morgenthau’s clients, Stanley Barnard and his mother, clash over the family hardware company, Jack bows out. It’s a conflict of interest, after all, though he still infuriates both Barnards. Partners in the Firm Underwriting Committee, in a power grab, use Jack’s newly irate clients as grounds to force him out of the firm. Trouble, meanwhile, is also brewing just across the street from the Barnards’ factory. Old Rick Kozak, founder of We Love Trash, fields an offer to buy his transfer station. The buyer’s representative, Larry Evans, is actually a hit man who’s ridden into town to take out the company owner. But Larry’s client apparently wants more than just Old Rick murdered, so the killer will have to stay in Philadelphia for a spell. Jack, debating whether or not to fight the FUC, has no idea what he would do if he opted to retire. Larry’s considering retirement, too, but his hit list unfortunately has a new name: Jack’s daughter Monica, an Environmental Protection Agency lawyer. The two men’s lives inevitably intersect, with a surprising outcome. Kole (Suggestion of Death, 2011, etc.) seasons her novel with a bit of farce; sure, characters pronounce FUC as “eff-you-see,” but it’s hard not to glimpse the sporadically uttered curse. Jack is a refreshingly direct protagonist. When head of operations David Smith, for example, tries to pack up Jack’s office, Jack bluntly tells him, “I’m one of your bosses. Get out of my office.” At the same time, the calculating Larry is chilling. He may be losing his taste for his profession, but he kills more than one person in the story, and he’s clearly exceptional at it. Regardless, the author retains her tongue-in-cheek narrative all the way until the final act, a coda that’s both unnerving and gleefully comical—with the potential for a follow-up book featuring at least one of the characters.
A witty tale with two retirees—a lawyer and a hit man—cleverly paralleled.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-9972286-0-1
Page Count: 286
Publisher: Vinson Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 23, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
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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
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by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951
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
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