An interesting, plausible, fast-paced tale.
In Young’s (Epsilon Zeta, 2006, etc.) latest novel, two college students find themselves caught in a deadly conspiracy.
Alpha 7, a covert branch of the Cuban military designed to mitigate smuggler and drug-trafficking activities in South and Central America, bungles an assassination attempt on a notorious pirate agent. Cuban officials scramble to recover their losses and maintain government secrets. Meanwhile, Pete Stephen and Ryder Westcott, recent graduates of Florida State University, celebrate their achievements by embarking on a deep sea fishing adventure off the coast of Florida. Ryder catches the big one, but, instead of a fish, he reels in a large blue ice chest containing $30,000. The captain of their skiff pulls a gun, a fight ensues, and Pete accidentally kills him. Still in shock, Ryder and Pete then rescue a man floating in the ocean, who, shortly after boarding, takes over their boat. Another fight ensues and more dead bodies litter the small vessel. Not far away, Coast Guard officials investigate two bullet-strewn cruisers replete with dead and unscrupulous crew members. Mack Olen, a seasoned DEA agent, is called on to unravel the ambiguity of execution-style methods and weapons used. When three savagely murdered bodies are found in a deserted fishing boat off the coast of Andros Island in the Bahamas, U.S. and Bahamian police forces join efforts to break a drug ring. They uncover links to international, upper-level government envoys. Pete and Ryder discover information exposing Cuban connections to the assassinations of several U.S. political representatives. They become pawns of international intrigue, with Olen as their only tenuous ally. Surrounded by scoundrels, crooked cops and government bureaucrats with connections all the way up the international food chain, Pete and Ryder fight to prove their innocence and preserve their lives. Some scenes fall flat and the plethora of characters is distracting, but overall the sustained action, divided into short segments, keeps the story moving.
An interesting, plausible, fast-paced tale.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-60461-789-4
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: April 14, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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