As the heroine aptly says: “It’s a Hallmark movie except for all the dead people.”
Prospero "Whip" Stark, the ex–baseball pitcher who owns Arizona’s Double Wide trailer park, juggles three murder cases, two of them with uncomfortably personal connections.
Whip’s girlfriend, KPIN-TV reporter Roxanne Santa Cruz, calls him one morning to ask him to check up on Ash Sterling, the mortally ill Afghan war hero and admitted leader of the Champagne Cowboys, a highly successful gang of thieves, whom Roxy’s been interviewing in what looks like his final days. And so they are. Accompanied by his buddy Cashmere Miller, Double Wide tenant and convicted felon, Whip finds Sterling shot to death, presumably before he could spill the beans about the Foothills murders, whose victims, attorney Paul Morton and his wife, Donna, were good friends of Whip’s. Evidence placed the Cowboys at the murder scene, and although Sterling insists that he and his buddies would never kill anybody, he hinted the night before his death that he knew more about the case than he’d told anyone. Prompted by the discovery that the Cowboys included Sterling’s fellow vets Pvt. Titus Ortega and Lance Cpl. Vincent Strong, Whip (Double Wide, 2018) is eager to pursue Sterling’s killer and even more eager to discover who shot the Mortons. But there’s a third case that will always be first in his heart: the fatal stabbing of Cristy Carlyle, for which Whip’s father, Sam Houston Stark, a beloved professor at Arizona State before he got dragged down by heroin, was arrested, tried, and imprisoned. It’s bad enough that leads in this cold case are scant; what’s even worse is that Wanda Dietz, the Tempe Police Department detective who arrested Sam, shows absolutely no interest in following them up. Whip’s adventures bring him up against a broad spectrum of variously untrustworthy and clueless types, from a priest with an eye for the dollar to a “food court twerp” whose hilariously demented dialogue seems copied verbatim from a comic strip.
As the heroine aptly says: “It’s a Hallmark movie except for all the dead people.”Pub Date: March 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-73242-264-3
Page Count: 267
Publisher: Brash Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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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