On the track of child killers with global reach, a dogged investigator uncovers a plot that gives new meaning to ecclesiastic militancy, in a chillingly effective debut by the pseudonymous Case. Joe Lassiter, the head of a transnational security firm, is devastated by the inexplicable murders of his sister Kathy and her young son Brandon. When the only suspect in the crime, a closemouthed Italian, escapes from a Virginia hospital's prison ward, he assigns himself to the case. Lassiter follows a winding trail that leads him around Europe to Naples (home of Umbra Domini, an ultraconservative Roman Catholic order committed to the church's old, preVatican II ways) and subsequently to a mountain village in Umbria. In this remote hamlet, he learns that a world-class geneticist named Ignazio Baresgi (since deceased) ran a clinic (now burned to the ground), which provided artificial-insemination services to a clientele that at one time included Kathy. Lassiter also learns that, before Baresi went into medicine, he was a respected theologian whose specialty was relics. Although the sinister Umbra Domini, headed by a charismatic priest named Silvio della Torre, and its legions of lay adherents on both sides of the Atlantic make several attempts to eliminate him, Lassiter persists in his inquiry. At length, he traces Dr. Baresi's only surviving patient—reclusive film star Callista Bates, who quit Hollywood cold at the height of her fame—to an island off the coast of Maine, where she lives quietly with her son, Jesse. Using Bates as a sounding board, Lassiter soon confirms his own suspicions that Baresi was using the remains of ancient holy men in ways that (thanks to a breach in confessional secrecy) sent Umbra Domini after him with a vengeance. Before the unarmed pair can act on their insights, however, they must deal with the deranged della Torre and his homicidal minions. A first-rate biotech thriller with an intriguing, if ungodly, religious twist.
Pub Date: April 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-449-91101-2
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1997
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 first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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