A fetching, believable romance injected into a rough-around-the-edges thriller.
A school psychologist is romanced by a man with ties to the Mafia in the author’s debut thriller.
Abbey Price, working as a psychologist for a school district in New Jersey, is shocked when she’s told that a student she’d been helping has committed suicide. Acting as an amateur sleuth, she looks into the death while at the same time being wooed by Mike, whose father, Frank Russo, heads a crime syndicate. Mike does his best to distance himself from the violence associated with his family, neither he nor Abbey realizing that the mob may be the answer to Abbey’s unofficial investigation. Hersey’s novel delivers what readers look for in the genre, opening with an unknown woman, beaten and bound, approached by an unknown man in a suit and tie. These two characters aren’t identified until much later in the story, and anticipation builds as Abbey is drawn into Mike’s dangerous life. Parts of the narrative do feel repetitive: Frank’s unmasked “disappointment” in his son is too frequently noted. And it’s hard to ignore Abbey’s selfish behavior: She talks to the dead student’s friend and visits the father—even having Mike distract him while she searches a bedroom—to alleviate her own guilt regarding the suicide. Notwithstanding, Abbey is an appealing protagonist, one whose distrust in men is understandable; she’s endured a cheating boyfriend, her father’s suicide and the death of a friend. Her relationship with Mike, an equally laudable character, is traditional—Mike asks first before holding Abbey’s hand or putting his arm around her—and it’s a welcome counterbalance to a novel rampant with hardened criminals.
A fetching, believable romance injected into a rough-around-the-edges thriller.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Dog Ear Publisher
Review Posted Online: Oct. 9, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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