Third-novelist Miller gets the details down, but the characters remain clichés without inner lives or credibility.
Inner-city chronicler Miller (I’m Telling, 2002, etc.) returns to drug dealers, welfare moms, and violent teenagers.
Three twentysomething, politically correct friends are determined to survive and thrive: Brenda Carver is an African-American single mother of four, on welfare, who wants to be a novelist; Rosa Rivera is a Puerto Rican who dreams of becoming an actress; and Sharif Goldsby is a gay activist who wants to improve people’s lives. All three live in the Ida B. Barrett Wells Tower, a federally subsidized project in Harlem rumored to be scheduled for demolition and replacement by luxury apartments. Miller’s prose is as graphic and gritty as her setting, and the story, though not exactly uplifting, is testimony to hope and perseverance despite a slight presence of the clumsy and formulaic (in the epilogue we learn that the story just told is the first draft of Brenda’s roman à clef novel). The residents of Ida B. routinely defraud the federal government, sell stolen goods, take drugs, and have indiscriminate sexual liaisons. Their response to trouble is often violence, so when foster child Jimmy, who’s been living with Brenda’s mother across the hall, is brutally raped and murdered by Ronald, who lives with his mother in the block, Ronald is then shot in vengeance by another resident, the college-bound Ricky. Immediately, Brenda, whose son found Jimmy’s body stuffed into a clothes dryer; Rosa, who finally has a part in a downtown play; and Sharif, an old protest-pro, decide to get Ricky out of trouble. They organize protests against the police; with the help of Rosa’s well-connected director, they find a lawyer; and an old friend whose mom, the resident fence, lives in the block is willing for reasons of his own to confess to the murder. Ida B. is destined for destruction, but the three friends are not.
Third-novelist Miller gets the details down, but the characters remain clichés without inner lives or credibility.Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2004
ISBN: 0-7432-6001-5
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Enough characters, confrontations, secrets, and subplots to fill the stage of an opera house—and leave spectators from the...
After an absence of five years, Hart finds more to mine in the fertile land of the Southern gothic.
Hart returns brimming with plotlines and melodramatics. For starters, there are three emotionally and physically wounded characters. Front and center stands Elizabeth Black, a detective on the police force in an unnamed North Carolina city. Feisty, irrepressible Elizabeth has been furloughed after an incident in a cellar in which she pumped 18 bullets into two men who had bound and raped an 18-year-old girl named Channing. "Hero Cop or Angel of Death?" ask headlines, as a formal investigation into possibly excessive force looms likely. Elizabeth is also obsessed with Adrian Wall, an ex-cop in prison for the murder of Julia Strange. Black insists he’s innocent; she also suspects she loves him. And so she ignores department orders to stay away from Wall, seeking him out soon after he’s released from prison. Meanwhile, in a vivid scene that opens the book, Julia Strange’s son, Gideon, a 14-year-old whose “thoughts [run] crooked sometimes,” lights out from home and his father, “an empty man,” to shoot Wall the morning he walks free. Elizabeth, Channing, and Gideon are linked by troubled relationships with their parents, and the offsprings’ efforts to surmount the discord becomes a major theme in the book. There are, as well, other pertinent tropes—Wall’s case eventually raises issues of police corruption and prison abuse. Threaded through the steadily paced plot is a series of cross-cuts to the first-person narration of an unidentified man, a lurking bogeyman who moves, unobserved, among the other characters as he kidnaps and tortures several women. His identity is not hard to guess, and the familiarity of his scenes, however chilling, mars the plotting. A protracted action scene resolves the strands of the plot, and a touching epilogue lends a closing note of poignancy.
Enough characters, confrontations, secrets, and subplots to fill the stage of an opera house—and leave spectators from the orchestra to the balcony moved and misty-eyed.Pub Date: May 3, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-312-38036-6
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2016
The worst fear raised by this odd creature feature is that it will spawn a sequel.
When he and his widowed mother are threatened by a freakish killer, a brilliant 11-year-old boy on the autism spectrum teams with an orphaned dog with human intelligence to fight off evil.
The boy, Woody, hasn't spoken a word in his life but has created a sophisticated virtual world to escape to and can hack the most complex dark web networks. He's determined to avenge his researcher father, who died in a suspicious helicopter crash. The dog, Kipp, orphaned by the death of his aged, loving caretaker, is part of an underground canine network boasting many other similarly advanced, genetically engineered dogs. (These dogs, who call themselves the Mysterium, are capable of such miracles as retrieving books from the library and reading them at night.) Out of the blue, a man who once worked with Woody's father and briefly dated Megan, Woody's mother, propositions and then threatens her. "I am becoming the king of beasts," he boasts, after having bitten a young woman to death. There is certainly no lack of raw action in the book, Koontz's first following five novels featuring investigator Jane Hawk. It just takes a certain kind of reader to...swallow the plot. Depending on one's susceptibility to heart-tugging boy-and-dog tales, the novel will either be dismissed as a work of cloying commercial calculation or enjoyed as a crafty blend of genres.
The worst fear raised by this odd creature feature is that it will spawn a sequel.Pub Date: April 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-1542019507
Page Count: 380
Publisher: Thomas & Mercer
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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