Hot on the heels of Mary Willis Walker's Under the Beetle's Cellar (p. 818), another post-Waco hostage crisis, this one a stunner from the author of Praying for Sleep (1994) and ten other suspense novels. The hostages this time are eight deaf Kansas schoolgirls and their two teachers, held in an abandoned slaughterhouse by murderous escaped convict Lou Handy and his two sadistic sidekicks. Premier FBI negotiator Arthur Potter expects this showdown to be relatively routineafter all, Handy and his pals aren't terrorists out to make a point, just felons trying to make their getawayso he figures he can string the negotiations out and wear out the bad guys. But as soon as the police rig up Handy with a cellular phone, he threatens to kill one hostage an hour until he gets transport and more weapons, and he starts out right away to show he's not kidding. Meanwhile, Potter's supposed allies from the local scene are busy undermining him: The governor has authorized a rogue operation to storm the slaughterhouse; a maverick assistant attorney general has ideas about swapping himself for the hostages; and the Fourth Estate, unaware that Handy's watching himself on TV, is plotting to get some close-up footage of the big event. The only hope, it seems, is with patient, uncompromising Potter, together with Kansas cop Charlie Budd; timid hostage Melanie Charrol, an apprentice teacher; and Sharon Foster, a state detective who talked Handy out of an earlier confrontation. But just when it seems that the situation's finally under control, Deaver ignites some diabolical new fireworks that will leave you agog. If this climax strains too hard for Hannibal Lecter supervillainy, most readers will be too busy losing their sleep over Deaver's outsized thriller and casting its other rolesMarlee Matlin looks like a shoo-in for Melanieto care. (First printing of 200,000; $200,000 ad/promo; Literary Guild featured alternate; author tour)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-670-86622-9
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1995
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
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
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