Patton keeps the pot boiling briskly in the deceptively laid-back manner of Elmore Leonard, but his real gift is to get...
Max Travis, the white-knight ADA of Portland, Oregon, is in big trouble this time, and it’s all his fault.
Max (The Shake, 2000) doesn’t think he’s in trouble, of course. Max thinks he’s in love. The twice-divorced workaholic, who’s just been dumped by his old professional rival, defense attorney Paige Prescott, has caught the eye of hairstylist Dana Waverleigh just as his friend Bill Roop was splitting up with her, and he’s fallen hard. After one night together he can hear bells ringing; after three dates they’re talking about marriage and children; after two weeks Max feels as if he’s known her forever. But he hasn’t, or he’d know that in addition to her three husbands, she’s been with a man who fathered one of her daughters and, more recently and disastrously, with Jack Nitzl, the underhanded used-car dealer who, inspired by her offhand remark about the home safe where Roop keeps the take from his bar, has staged a home invasion together with cranked-up body-shop owner Nicky Bortolotti—who, surprised to see Roop entertaining retired basketball player Highwire Harris and not that crazy about African-Americans anyway, has capped the evening by shooting the athlete. It gets worse. Jack, catching a glimpse of Dana as he flees the scene, threatens to give her up to the cops as a willing co-conspirator unless she feeds him information on every move Max is making. And Nicky, for whom personal loyalty is a lot less important than his next fix, is getting more and more impatient with anybody he thinks might be onto him.
Patton keeps the pot boiling briskly in the deceptively laid-back manner of Elmore Leonard, but his real gift is to get inside his driven characters—from sky-high Nicky to basically nice Dana to Max, dazed by a love too good to be true—and evoke the energy and frequent sweetness behind their improbable ardor.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-765-30649-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2003
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
Genetically engineered dinosaurs run amok in Crichton's new, vastly entertaining science thriller. From the introduction alone—a classically Crichton-clear discussion of the implications of biotechnological research—it's evident that the Harvard M.D. has bounced back from the science-fantasy silliness of Sphere (1987) for another taut reworking of the Frankenstein theme, as in The Andromeda Strain and The Terminal Man. Here, Dr. Frankenstein is aging billionaire John Hammond, whose monster is a manmade ecosystem based on a Costa Rican island. Designed as the world's ultimate theme park, the ecosystem boasts climate and flora of the Jurassic Age and—most spectacularly—15 varieties of dinosaurs, created by elaborate genetic engineering that Crichton explains in fascinating detail, rich with dino-lore and complete with graphics. Into the park, for a safety check before its opening, comes the novel's band of characters—who, though well drawn, double as symbolic types in this unsubtle morality play. Among them are hero Alan Grant, noble paleontologist; Hammond, venal and obsessed; amoral dino-designer Henry Wu; Hammond's two innocent grandchildren; and mathematician Ian Malcolm, who in long diatribes serves as Crichton's mouthpiece to lament the folly of science. Upon arrival, the visitors tour the park; meanwhile, an industrial spy steals some dino embryos by shutting down the island's power—and its security grid, allowing the beasts to run loose. The bulk of the remaining narrative consists of dinos—ferocious T. Rex's, voracious velociraptors, venom-spitting dilophosaurs—stalking, ripping, and eating the cast in fast, furious, and suspenseful set-pieces as the ecosystem spins apart. And can Grant prevent the dinos from escaping to the mainland to create unchecked havoc? Though intrusive, the moralizing rarely slows this tornado-paced tale, a slick package of info-thrills that's Crichton's most clever since Congo (1980)—and easily the most exciting dinosaur novel ever written. A sure-fire best-seller.
Pub Date: Nov. 7, 1990
ISBN: 0394588169
Page Count: 424
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1990
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