This thriller relies on a lot of suspense-genre tropes, but it’s richly imagined, and its characters are fun to follow—even...
A heist novel that takes a decidedly surreal turn when its posse of professional burglars enters an ultraviolent underworld.
To most of the people she knows, Kim Sawyer appears to be a fairly normal Englishwoman who’s studious, affable, and gives lectures on art history. Nobody knows that she was once known as Alice or that she was an aspiring art thief. She might have made the big time if her gang hadn’t accidentally murdered one of its marks. Now, her old friend Max has re-emerged to coax her back into the game. The gang’s new ringleader is a mysterious American named Franklin D. Tyler; after he fakes a shooting to test her reaction under pressure, she knows that she can’t trust a word he says. Tyler arranges a heist on a seemingly closed antiques shop, but soon the thieves find themselves descending into a subterranean compound full of trained killers, and they must use their wits and any available weapons to stay alive. This is not a typical con’s-last-job story; instead, Boote’s novel turns into a macabre survivalist fantasy, complete with hand-to-hand combat and hostages burned alive. The story’s English landscape lends itself to witty Cockney dialogue, and the author makes clear the class division between Kim, an astute academic, and Tyler’s henchmen, who speak in rough slang. The nonstop action is sometimes exhausting, and Boote leans heavily on pop-culture references, as when a character is reminded of the films The Sound of Music, Iron Sky, and Outpost in quick succession. However, the author also capably describes his characters’ fear, and reluctant courage, in the face of homicidal maniacs. Most of the novel feels cinematic, and the finale is particularly easy to imagine as an action-movie denouement. Boote also adds some depth to his story by using fine art and mythology to embellish his theme: was Pandora’s box a story of releasing evil into the world, or is it about natural human curiosity? Meanwhile, Kim is torn between the security of her new life and the thrill of breaking the rules.
This thriller relies on a lot of suspense-genre tropes, but it’s richly imagined, and its characters are fun to follow—even into deadly catacombs.Pub Date: May 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1785106651
Page Count: -
Publisher: Dog Ear Publisher
Review Posted Online: April 30, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
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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