First novel about a serial killer who stalks the families of Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) operatives, then about the man who stalks him. Miller opens with the gruesome slaughter of a Cub Scout on a field trip in the Smoky Mountains, thus diverting the boy's father (the killer's ultimate target) away from his wife, who is grieving from the recent death of her daughter—at the hands of the same killer, it turns out. The killer, creepy Martin Fletcher, shows up disguised as a doctor to dispense a lethal injection to the hapless wife. The scene then shifts to Montana, where former DEA agent Paul Masterson leads a solitary life in a remote mountain cabin, estranged from his wife, daughter, and son after a failed drug interdiction left him crippled and half-blind. Fletcher used to be a drug agent, too, and has sworn vengeance on the families of every former colleague he feels betrayed him. He's succeeded all too well and is down to his last family, the Mastersons. Paul, crippled in spirit as much as body, is brought back into the fray and ends up not only struggling to run down the maniacal Fletcher but dealing with nasty with departmental politics and a wife who doesn't know him (or trust him) anymore. The scenes in backwoods Montana are overdrawn, but Miller does his manhunt well, right down to his correctly rendered radio talk between Masterson and various pilots. And on the trail of death, Masterson begins to come alive again, to accept how deeply he cares about his family. Fletcher's no Hannibal Lector—he's clever enough, but Miller doesn't bring to bear a sufficiency of detail to convince you that such a killer could exist. Still, the author writes with a tough authority and knows how to generate suspense. There are more novels about serial killers than serial killers, but this one's a cut above. (Literary Guild main selection)
Pub Date: June 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-553-10213-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1996
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
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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