An engagingly written series starter with a bounty of plot twists and Miami vices.
An attorney links a present-day betrayal and murder in Florida to unsolved past crimes in Gordon’s debut legal thriller.
Miami lawyer Vance Courage still thinks about a decades-old cold case of a murdered waitress at the Hotel Mutiny from when he was a cop. The Mutiny catered to drug kingpins who demanded expensive champagne, girls, and more. His friend Daniel Ruiz, a retired police sergeant, hasn’t forgotten the crime either. In the present day, Vance is dating “tall, whippet-thin blonde” Lauren Gold, whom he met on a dating website. However, Lauren, a freelance video marketing producer, is catfishing Vance at the request of Ray Dinero, her friend and singular client, who has a connection to the drug gangs. Meanwhile, Vance’s uncle Tony Famosa slithers back into his nephew’s life after hiding in Cuba for 20 years. The FBI long has had Tony on its most-wanted list for smuggling billions of dollars’ worth of cocaine into Florida—and much of the money is still missing. It turns out that Tony may be connected to Ray, and he’s also linked to a Cuban sociopath, Ramon “Mongo” Solana, who was at the Mutiny on the fateful night that the waitress died—as was Lauren. Coincidences start piling up, and Vance and Daniel may finally get to the bottom of that unsolved crime. Readers may be intrigued by the fact that this story was inspired by events at the real-life Hotel Mutiny in Miami, where the author worked in the late 1970s and early ’80s. Rich descriptions fill the pages of this novel; for example, Daniel’s face features “fleshy folds between his eyes, deep enough to clamp a dime.” Some of Gordon’s word choices are particularly evocative, as when a killer with a deformed foot “crabbed out of the room.” The characters are distinctive, and protagonist Vance is shown to have considerable flaws. It should be noted, however, that there are violent scenes of murder and sexual predation that may be over-the-top for some readers.
An engagingly written series starter with a bounty of plot twists and Miami vices.Pub Date: Jan. 15, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-73360-641-7
Page Count: 358
Publisher: Gordon Productions, LLC
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2019
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
