by John Lansing ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 31, 2012
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Lansing offers a debut novel about an ex–New York Police Department narcotics chief drawn out of retirement when drug-gang violence gets personal.
Jack Bertolino left his hometown of New York City for Los Angeles after back pain sidelined him from the force. Since then, he’s been gardening and nurturing his penchant for red wine. Things change, however, when Mia, a gorgeous Colombian informant whom Jack knew intimately, turns up murdered. The brutal manner of her death, nicknamed “the Devil’s Necktie,” is a surefire sign that drug kingpins ordered the hit. The Los Angeles police initially suspect Jack but quickly clear him—and then rebuff him when he offers his help. He investigates the murder on his own, using his experience, instincts and invaluable connections from his cartel-busting days to unearth new evidence that makes the LAPD crawl back to him. He discovers a web of 18th Street Angels gang members, big-time Mexican and Colombian cocaine traffickers, and heartless criminals tied to Jack’s and Mia’s pasts. Lansing, a former writer for TV’s Walker, Texas Ranger and Scoundrels, crafts a compelling hero in Jack, who has a son at Stanford, an ex-wife back East, and classic tastes—including a fondness for Benziger wine, Miles Davis’ “Kind of Blue” album and his sterling gray Mustang GT. He has the appeal of a Hollywood leading man in the vein of Harrison Ford, particularly when romantic sparks fly with Deputy District Attorney Leslie Sager. The cinematic plot unspools at a smooth pace, cleanly shifting from one scene to the next and allowing readers to put the pieces together themselves. When action erupts, Lansing doesn’t hold back, and the explosive finale reads like something that blockbuster director Michael Bay might dream up. A pulse-pounding thriller with a charming protagonist.
Pub Date: Dec. 31, 2012
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 295
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Sept. 4, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by John Lansing
BOOK REVIEW
by John Lansing
BOOK REVIEW
by John Lansing
by Harper Lee ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 11, 1960
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
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by Harper Lee
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SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
by Caitlin Mullen ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 3, 2020
A lyrical, incisive, and haunting debut.
In Atlantic City, the bodies of several women wait to be discovered and a young psychic begins having visions of terrible violence.
They are known only as Janes 1 through 6, the women who have been strangled and left in the marsh behind the seedy Sunset Motel. They wait for someone to miss them, to find them. That someone might be Clara, a teenage dropout who works the Atlantic City strip as a psychic and occasionally has visions. She can tell there's something dangerous at work, but she has other problems. To pay the rent, she begins selling her company, and then her body, to older men. One day she meets Lily, another young woman who'd escaped the depressing decay of Atlantic City for New York only to be betrayed by a man. She’s come back to AC because there’s nowhere else to go, and she spends her time working a dead-end job and drinking herself into oblivion. Together, Clara and Lily may be able to figure out the truth—but they will each lose something along the way. Mullen’s style is subtle, flowing; she switches the narrative voice with each chapter, giving us Clara and Lily but also each of the victims. At the heart of the novel lies the bitter observation that “Women get humiliated every day, in small stupid ways and in huge, disastrous ones.” Mullen writes about all the moments that women compromise themselves in the face of male desire and male power and how they learn to use sex as commerce because “men are always promised this, no matter who they are.” The other major character in the novel is Atlantic City itself: fading; falling to ruin; promising an old sort of glamour that no longer exists; swindling sad, lonely people out of their money. This backdrop is unexpected and well rendered.
A lyrical, incisive, and haunting debut.Pub Date: March 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-2748-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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