Maxim (Time Out of Mind, 1986, etc.) forsakes the astral plane for a suspenser whose down-and-dirty plot turns on the megabuck traffic in bogus prescription drugs. Michael Fallon's charmed life suddenly goes badly wrong. His beloved uncle Jake (a political fixer with connections throughout New York City) is brutally murdered, and his fiancÇe is gunned down in a botched convenience-store robbery. Shortly thereafter, Michael is fired by the Wall Street investment firm that pays him big money to analyze the pharmaceuticals stocks, and he's assaulted on a well-lit Manhattan street. Convinced someone wants him dead as well as discredited, he goes to ground in off-season Martha's Vineyard. Back in the Big Apple, Brendan Doyle, a godfatherly lawyer, is digging into the death of his old pal Jake and the real cause of Michael's dismissal—an inquiry that eventually leads to Baron Franz Gerhard Rast von Scharnhorst, an ostensibly respectable German industrialist whom Jake, years before, had forced to flee the US. The powerful head of AdlerChemiker AG, a Munich-based multinational that, among other dubious achievements, has gained working control of the lucrative global trade in counterfeit drugs, Baron Franz is mounting a belated vendetta. While young Michael's friends and foes stalk one another, he falls in love with Megan Cole (a year-round island resident with a past), buys a guest house in Edgartown, and finally discloses his whereabouts to Doyle. The body count climbs, and heavies in the pay of the vindictive baron fall to Michael & Co. in a climactic clash. With astute assistance from Doyle, the last of the Fallons is then able to settle outstanding accounts with AdChem and its hirelings; at the close, he lights out after Megan, who needs to be convinced they have a future together. A slick, engrossing entertainment with plausibly motivated characters and chilling detail on an underground enterprise that's evidently as remunerative as narcotics. (First printing of 50,000)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-380-97300-6
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Avon/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1996
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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
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