The casual purchase of a cheap copy of the Quran on the streets of Baghdad leads to a shocking discovery and a plot spanning half the Middle East.
When Miami journalist Carlos Lopez discovers an old parchment tucked inside the Quran he buys from a street vendor in Baghdad, he brings it to his friend Professor Prescott for help in deciphering it. Idle curiosity turns far more serious when the professor turns up dead shortly afterward, prompting Lopez to visit Cairo in an attempt to figure out why this document would be motive for murder. He quickly finds himself allied with Cyril Sahani of the Department of Lost and Stolen Antiquities of the Egyptian Ministry of Culture—despite the baroque title, Cyril is frequently armed and is by a wide margin the book’s most interesting character. The two of them—an odd-couple pairing that never quite ignites—embark on a quest that takes them from Damascus to Morocco, with many a stop in between for kidnapping, gunplay and visits to a series of ancient clerics and Quran experts. The mysterious fragment looks to be a lost writing of the Prophet and therefore a potentially world-changing discovery. The pair’s activities don’t go unnoticed—not only are they dogged by the agents of potential buyers, they’re shadowed by secret religious forces intent on preventing their find from ever becoming public knowledge. These secretive forces employ an enormous wrestler and a deadly assassin/Shakespeare buff named Othello Woo who steals every scene he’s in—between jobs ice-picking his helpless victims to death, he laments that there’s so much violence in the world. Unfortunately, Roig’s prose is often too wooden for the excitement of the plot he’s dreamed up. The story is told in the present tense, which is trickier than it looks, but readers will keep going just the same. A thought-provoking, intriguingly religious take on the standard international thriller.
Pub Date: March 25, 2011
ISBN: 978-1456773229
Page Count: 235
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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