A Gorky Park-style thriller that's truly frightening—because it's set in today's Iran, which in Koenig's expert hands (Smuggler's Notch, 1988, etc.) unfolds as a modern-day Bedlam run by Muslim fanatics. There's no clue given as to whether Koenig visited Iran to research this story, but readers will feel as if they've gone there and escaped with their lives. Their guide to this sinister land and its amazements—like the box shaped like a pencil sharpener that's replaced swords for amputating thieves' fingers, or the seegah, ``temporary wives'' who marry for as little as an hour in a kind of sanctioned prostitution—is Darius Bahktiar. An American-educated prosecutor under the Shah, Darius years back killed a top dog of the Shah's secret police who'd gotten away with murder; thrown into dreaded Evin prison, Darius became a hero upon Khomeini's ascent and now is Teheran's homicide chief. But, with his Western ways, he's under constant suspicion by the Committee for the Revolution and its leader known as Bijan, who yanks Darius from the case that opens the story—the slaying of a woman involved in drug-running. Besieged at home as well—his ultrareligious wife wants a divorce- -but not to be blocked, Darius pursues the case—which turns up two more dead drug-runners—into a tangle of clues pointing to a group of female Muslim revolutionaries known as the Brides of Blood, and to the smuggling not just of heroin but of mycotoxins, agents of chemical warfare. When he begins to realize that Bijan wants the mycotoxins for Iran's arsenal, Darius is tossed back into prison and brutally tortured. A dramatic escape in which they pose as corpses allows Darius and his new love—a former Bride of Blood—to race for Turkey, mycotoxins in hand but with Bijan close behind. An absorbing mystery, incandescent action, and an Iran locked in nightmare: Salman Rushdie would love this novel.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-8021-1536-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1992
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
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
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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