Utah is known for its striking landscape and Latter-day Saint presence. Here we get both. And a well-crafted plot.
In Millson’s (9,000 Miles of Fatherhood, 2014) novel, we have a frantic father with missing kids, a ruthless, charismatic Latter-day Saint “prophet,” his breakaway settlement south of Salt Lake City, his vicious henchmen, and a whole leaky bag of chicanery and deadly mayhem.
As prologue, geologist Annie McKeefe disappears while trying to plot a gas pipeline route in the Arizona backcountry. Six months later, the real story begins with Tom McKeefe, her still devastated husband and father of their two children. Then the kids disappear, and Tom is accused of killing them on a camping trip. Detective Rulon Allred of the Salt Lake City Police Department seems totally convinced of Tom’s guilt. But in fact Allred is a loyal lieutenant of the fanatical Everett Deavers, president of the Church of the Blood Atonement in his settlement of Redemption, Utah. So our hero, Tom, must find his kids—hopefully alive—and the real killers in order to clear his name. We do have good guys here, among them Carter Miguel, Pulitzer-winning reporter for the Salt Lake Beacon; old desert rat Gerdeen Dyer; and Casey Reynolds, who is very rightly concerned about the kids in Redemption. Soon Tom is on the run. A young boy’s mutilated body has been found outside of Redemption, and Allred claims it is that of Eddie McKeefe when—as he knows—it is the young son of the Dykstras, a family that Deavers has had killed. Looking for a key witness, Tom winds up in the Barrancas del Cobre (Copper Canyon) in northern Mexico, which ultimately exposes yet another of Allred’s lies. Now it’s all closing in on Deavers, making him all the more dangerous and the good guys all the more determined to bring him down. As a lifelong newspaperman, Millson has two things going for him: He knows how to write (although he could use a copy editor), and he also knows the newspaper business, politics, and cops. We know from the get-go that Tom is an innocent man and that he not only has to save his kids and clear his name, but he has to fight a crushing sense of despair. Millson gives us characters who are easy to hate (Deavers, Allred, the throwback Jackson Reems) and to love (scruffy but knowing Gerdeen, staunch ally Carter, and Casey, who will be Tom’s final salvation). A particularly good episode is his incredible trek through Copper Canyon and his meetup with Emilio, the always happy and always drunk drug running pilot who rescues him more than once. This is a jam-packed novel, the run-up to the climax is well handled, and the tension is palpable as Tom sneaks into Redemption and sets off a nail-biting finale.
Utah is known for its striking landscape and Latter-day Saint presence. Here we get both. And a well-crafted plot.Pub Date: Jan. 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-79438-843-7
Page Count: 334
Publisher: Time Tunnel Media
Review Posted Online: May 10, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 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
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