A sharp, contemporary crime novel with classic genre elements.
In Woods’ (Phone Call From Hell And Other Tales of the Damned, 2014, etc.) noirish tale, a just-paroled convict goes after two women whose double cross led to his imprisonment.
When the recession forces Atlanta-based war veteran Bill Derringer into a 14-week furlough from his job as a waste-management truck driver, he and his wife, Edie, find themselves short on both cash and entertainment. She suggests a trip to Orlando, Florida, to see a murder trial, so they pack up their clothes and their two kids and head south. They crash at Edie’s cousin Ida’s place, but it isn’t long before the unemployed “Aunt Ida,” as she’s called, proposes robbing a local guns-and-ammo show. Derringer is surprised to learn that Edie and Aunt Ida have been lovers since high school, and after the robbery, he finds out that Aunt Ida’s plan to escape to Mexico City with the loot doesn’t include him. He winds up in prison for the heist, while the two women vanish. Five-and-a-half years later, he reports to a Miami halfway house, initially invested in finding his estranged children. But he soon makes tracks for Mexico City. Along the way, he becomes a courier for a mysterious suitcase that once belonged to Beat Generation writer William S. Burroughs, and even agrees to infiltrate a drug cartel for an unspecified U.S. agency—but his true goal is revenge. Woods’ story has several pulp-fiction trademarks, including a slew of seedy characters and plenty of sex and violence. But the book isn’t as hard-boiled as readers may anticipate. For every brazen simile (“The afternoon sun beat down like a dominatrix in a sweat”), narrator Derringer drops a line that’s endearing or sentimental, as when he recalls when he and Edie “smooched and groped each other like movie matinee lovers.” Although the perpetually gruff protagonist is a hard man to like, he enjoyably teams up with fellow halfway house resident Jane Ryder, who’s equally cynical but also whip-smart and reliable. A gleefully convoluted final act includes Nazis, unexpected deaths, and an over-the-top villainous plot.
A sharp, contemporary crime novel with classic genre elements.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2016
ISBN: 978-8-28-355028-3
Page Count: -
Publisher: 280 Steps
Review Posted Online: March 10, 2017
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
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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