A sometimes-effective mystery that suffers from some distracting affectations.
Journalist Heller (The Someday File, 2014) returns to Chicago for another gritty and complicated Deuce Mora mystery.
Deuce, a star columnist for the Chicago Journal newspaper, is taking a relaxing walk through a local park with her boyfriend, Mark Hearst, when Mark’s dog finds a human femur that turns out to be a child’s remains. An investigation by the police and the Department of Children and Family Services uncovers more and more bodies of children, but city officials and feds try to keep the story quiet. The local police, for example, won’t say anything about the situation officially, but Deuce gets some off-the-record help from Sgt. Pete Rizzo, a Chicago Police spokesman; Dr. Tony Donato, a medical examiner; and some old friends in high places. The information eventually points her to a child trafficking ring. The National Security Agency and the FBI try to block her investigation, and Deuce eventually finds out that the murders are tangled up in city politics and international intrigue. She keeps pushing, even after her life is threatened multiple times and one of her sources is murdered. Along the way, she meets a kid named Charles; he and his brother are in separate foster homes, and his situation breaks her heart. Heller sets a lot of plates spinning in the first half of this book, and it can sometimes seem overly convenient when Deuce correctly guesses what’s going on. Things tighten up in the second half, which is expertly paced and leads to a thrilling conclusion. After the action is over, though, Heller gives readers a history lesson in Middle East politics—a forced attempt to add more relevance to the story that falls flat. Heller also peppers her prose with some clunky phrases that ape the language of hard-boiled detective novels; at one point, for example, Pete Rizzo describes another character as being “tough as the Bears’ search for a decent quarterback,” and Deuce communicates her sadness at a betrayal by saying, “To paraphrase the words of Marlon Brando to Rod Steiger in the 1954 film, On the Waterfront, he cudda been a contenda, he cudda been somebody.”
A sometimes-effective mystery that suffers from some distracting affectations.Pub Date: Sept. 7, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-692-77961-3
Page Count: 410
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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PERSPECTIVES
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