In his 10th outing, a steadfast gumshoe proves he can handle anything, even a story with a leisurely pace.
In this thriller, a dying man hires private investigator Bertrand McAbee to find the whereabouts of his brother, missing for nearly 30 years.
ALS–stricken Patrick McNulty, with a mere month to live, needs help. The wealthy Fort Lauderdale, Florida, man contacts his former professor McAbee, now a private eye in Davenport, Iowa. McNulty wants to know what happened to his long-lost brother, Francis. Three years before his 1987 disappearance, Francis publicly “went over” at a Rotary Club meeting, humiliating his affluent father, Liam, by renouncing the material world. Inspired by St. Francis of Assisi, he devoted his life to assisting those in need before suddenly vanishing. An anonymous package containing a plush wolf (an apparent reference to St. Francis) convinces Patrick his brother’s alive, but the consensus among friends and associates is quite the opposite. McAbee and colleagues at his agency, including hacker Barry Fisk and ex-cop Augusta Satin, scour Francis’ history for clues. They may catch a break when they notice a possible link to the kidnapping/murder of young Bobby White, occurring around the same time that Francis disappeared. McAbee’s search takes him to Italy for just a sign of Francis, dead or alive, so that the detective can hopefully bring solace to a man on the verge of death. The story is dense with information, with McAbee and Augusta interviewing a plethora of characters, most of whom offer little insight into Francis’ fate. McAbee acknowledges the occasional repetitiveness: “I’ve heard many stories like this about him,” he relates, following a lengthy discussion about Francis. Pertinent evidence, however, does eventually accumulate, like some who are sure Francis had money stashed somewhere, leading to a worthy wrap-up. McCaffrey (A Case of Silver, 2013, etc.) keeps his mystery simple and, despite parallelism between McAbee the skeptic and Francis the believer, doesn’t saturate the story with religious allegory. Back in Davenport, meanwhile, there’s drama––Barry seems to hate everyone, most particularly McAbee’s secretary, Pat Trump, (a mutual animosity)––as well as humor, like Augusta designating this case as decidedly less dangerous than usual.
In his 10th outing, a steadfast gumshoe proves he can handle anything, even a story with a leisurely pace.Pub Date: Feb. 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5049-7546-9
Page Count: 342
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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 strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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