An undemanding murder story reinforced by superlative characters who need not even leave the bar.
Members of a Pennsylvania social club find themselves at risk when a motorcycle gang rides into town in search of a sizable stash in this thriller.
Two bikers walking into the Italian-American Club in Oxton definitely stand out. Bartender Kimmy can serve only club members and signed-in guests. Furthermore, the men, looking for just-out-of-prison Pasquale “Pazz” Vukovic, belligerently demand drinks before finally leaving. Pazz, as it happens, using information from his dying cellmate, is after loot reputedly hidden somewhere in the club. Around the same time, Speedy, having recently lost his job as a maintenance man, inadvertently trips the club’s alarm early one morning. Joe Lorenzo, editor-reporter of a local weekly, thinks Speedy was the inside man for an attempted break-in. Things get more suspicious when Speedy turns up in a creek with a bullet hole in his head. Convinced the cops aren’t interested in solving the murder, Joe, a former investigative reporter, starts his own probe. Complicating matters is another bartender, Tracy, who’s harassed by both her pre-prison boyfriend, Pazz, and rich ex Derek. There are also those bikers, the Death Dealers, four in all, who’ve been frequenting bars in the area, asking about Pazz. Murders, meanwhile, continue, making it abundantly clear that someone’s willing to kill to get what he or she wants. Business author Cox’s (Hanging Fire, 2014, etc.) first foray into thriller territory is surprisingly lighthearted, notwithstanding spurts of violence; readers witness at least one shooting that’s chilling in its terseness. The characters and club setting, however, are so richly detailed that they feel warmly familiar. Moments like patrons at the bar with piles of cash in front of them (to avoid “fumbling with wallets”) are comical high points. The mystery is minimal, with just one truly unknown element—whether or not the dough is actually in the club. But trepidation in the final act is thoroughly elevated, putting several lives, including Joe’s, in peril. There are far too many excellent, well-rounded characters to list, all with their personal back stories. But Joe’s potential love interest, Annette, is memorable, caring for her dementia-ridden mother with no help from her sister Darbie, who revels in telling everyone her sibling’s probably a lesbian.
An undemanding murder story reinforced by superlative characters who need not even leave the bar.Pub Date: March 31, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5305-9919-6
Page Count: 294
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: July 7, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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