As addictive as a soap opera; a fun beach read—with a killer ending.
A grisly, senseless murder in a city on the Hawaiian island of Maui becomes the catalyst for new friendships in this debut novel.
Paia, the windsurfing capital of the world, is a quiet little piece of paradise on Maui until an unknown psychopath slits the throats of Mr. and Mrs. Okamoto, an elderly couple who run a small grocery store. The bodies are discovered early in the morning by Annie Boone, just as a hurricane is about to strike the island. Annie and her husband, George, are a spirited, retired couple, and their house serves as a collection point for the diverse characters who are brought together by the brutal slayings. There is Dewey McMaster, who was asleep in the rain across the street from the store when the murders were committed. As it turns out, Dewey has a secret—he is a lot more than the genial windsurfer locals have come to know over the last six months. And there are Layla and Kyle Richfield, who just arrived on Maui. Layla, an independently wealthy socialite, is still recovering from the traumatic still-birth of their first baby eight months earlier. Kyle and his partner, Kim Okamoto (yes, the son of the murdered couple), were in Hawaii to be honored at a pharmaceutical convention. Add into the mix Ned and Fiona Keller (he a local, semi-retired real estate agent, she a feisty Italian decorator) and the delightful, elderly Mr. Soo. This is less a murder mystery and more a vibrant narrative about new relationships (including a love interest) that is enhanced by copious amounts of shopping, decorating, and eating. In fact, the pace is so leisurely and the focus so thoroughly on the lives of Callahan’s eclectic ensemble cast that when the murderer strikes again the following year, readers, who by now have been lulled into mild complacency, will likely be left gasping. The unadorned prose provides the details of ordinary moments of daily life but with an enjoyable, glossy overlay that allows readers to indulge vicariously in the perks of an unlimited checkbook.
As addictive as a soap opera; a fun beach read—with a killer ending.Pub Date: Oct. 19, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5434-5023-1
Page Count: 649
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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