A violent, thrilling mystery hampered at times by overly gruesome exposition.
A debut novel following a former hit man who tries to eliminate old enemies before the past catches up with him.
Tristan Stonehorse just got out of prison; someone is already trying to kill him. While repaying a debt he owed a prison gang leader, Tristan finds himself in the middle of an ambush, realizing that someone from the past, someone dangerous and with deep connections, wants him gone for good. Unfortunately for Tristan, the list of suspects is long. After his time as one of the First Nation Syndicate’s top hit men in Canada, there are crooked Mounties, vengeful Hells Angels, and plenty of other shadowy underworld figures who wouldn’t mind him dead. His only clue comes from the execution of a former associate, whose last words point Tristan to a particular job he’d like to forget. As he moves across Canada to stay one step ahead of his pursuers, he revisits his time serving the British forces in Operation Desert Storm as well as the painful memories of his childhood abuse at the hands of twisted priests—a last vendetta he wants to repay and a source of surprising emotional vulnerability. As all these past sins start coming together and closing down on the resourceful Tristan, his daughter, who had finally moved out of the shadows of her father’s crimes, becomes both his biggest weakness and a potential path to real justice. Fleishman mainly writes in the present tense, creating a frantic and absorbing pace that builds intriguing distance from this dangerous main character as he reacts with brutal, calculated force. Tristan has all the makings of a tremendous and complex antihero, reminiscent of those found in Cormac McCarthy or James Ellroy novels. However, the past-tense chapters feel sluggish in comparison. These sections, which detail his past crimes, seem to limp from one grisly act of violence to the next. They provide answers about Tristan, but instead of adding depth, they make him less sympathetic and less interesting.
A violent, thrilling mystery hampered at times by overly gruesome exposition.Pub Date: June 30, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-9876927-1-9
Page Count: 254
Publisher: Wheat Kings Endeavor
Review Posted Online: July 24, 2015
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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