by Les Roberts ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 2011
A feast of vengeance served piping hot that’s quite a departure for the generally more reflective creator of Milan Jacovich...
In 1985, a hardened Vietnam veteran who’s settled in Chicago returns to Youngstown, Ohio, where he grew up and his priest brother has just committed suicide.
“I can’t really say I have a passion for anything,” Dominick Candiotti tells a newspaper reporter. Wrong. He’s passionate enough about Diane Burnham, the old college flame now married to an attorney, to burn up the sheets with her again at the drop of a hat, and passionate enough about his brother Alfonso, a diffident Youngstown police lieutenant, and his sister Teresa, a do-nothing whiner, to quiz them mercilessly about the apparent suicide of their brother, Father Richard Candiotti. Mainly, though, he has a passion for justice. First he tries to find out the truth about the much-loved Father Candy’s death by making the rounds of the mourners at his funeral, with special attention to members of the Severino family, who run the rackets on the west side of town, and their rivals, the Mangione family, who owe their loyalty to the Pittsburgh mob. When his barrage of questions finally moves someone beyond annoyance and dire warnings to a Youngstown Tune-Up—a fatal car bombing—Nicky goes into vigilante mode. The results, depending on your tolerance for torture and violent revenge, are either exhilarating or sickening. In a town in which “everyone I knew was connected in one way or another to mob crime and civic corruption,” it’s inevitable that there’ll be lots of casualties as Nicky implicates almost every citizen in Youngstown en route to an anticlimactic showdown.
A feast of vengeance served piping hot that’s quite a departure for the generally more reflective creator of Milan Jacovich (The Irish Sports Pages, 2002, etc.).Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-312-56633-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2011
Share your opinion of this book
More by Les Roberts
BOOK REVIEW
by Les Roberts
BOOK REVIEW
by Les Roberts
BOOK REVIEW
by Les Roberts
by Blake Crouch ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 26, 2016
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.
A man walks out of a bar and his life becomes a kaleidoscope of altered states in this science-fiction thriller.
Crouch opens on a family in a warm, resonant domestic moment with three well-developed characters. At home in Chicago’s Logan Square, Jason Dessen dices an onion while his wife, Daniela, sips wine and chats on the phone. Their son, Charlie, an appealing 15-year-old, sketches on a pad. Still, an undertone of regret hovers over the couple, a preoccupation with roads not taken, a theme the book will literally explore, in multifarious ways. To start, both Jason and Daniela abandoned careers that might have soared, Jason as a physicist, Daniela as an artist. When Charlie was born, he suffered a major illness. Jason was forced to abandon promising research to teach undergraduates at a small college. Daniela turned from having gallery shows to teaching private art lessons to middle school students. On this bracing October evening, Jason visits a local bar to pay homage to Ryan Holder, a former college roommate who just received a major award for his work in neuroscience, an honor that rankles Jason, who, Ryan says, gave up on his career. Smarting from the comment, Jason suffers “a sucker punch” as he heads home that leaves him “standing on the precipice.” From behind Jason, a man with a “ghost white” face, “red, pursed lips," and "horrifying eyes” points a gun at Jason and forces him to drive an SUV, following preset navigational directions. At their destination, the abductor forces Jason to strip naked, beats him, then leads him into a vast, abandoned power plant. Here, Jason meets men and women who insist they want to help him. Attempting to escape, Jason opens a door that leads him into a series of dark, strange, yet eerily familiar encounters that sometimes strain credibility, especially in the tale's final moments.
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.Pub Date: July 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-90422-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
Share your opinion of this book
More by Blake Crouch
BOOK REVIEW
by Blake Crouch
BOOK REVIEW
by Blake Crouch
BOOK REVIEW
by Blake Crouch
More About This Book
PROFILES
BOOK TO SCREEN
by Karin Slaughter ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 29, 2015
Slaughter (Cop Town, 2014, etc.) is so uncompromising in following her blood trails to the darkest places imaginable that...
Awards & Accolades
Our Verdict
GET IT
Kirkus Reviews'
Best Books Of 2015
New York Times Bestseller
Twenty-four years after a traumatic disappearance tore a Georgia family apart, Slaughter’s scorching stand-alone picks them up and shreds them all over again.
The Carrolls have never been the same since 19-year-old Julia vanished. After years of fruitlessly pestering the police, her veterinarian father, Sam, killed himself; her librarian mother, Helen, still keeps the girl's bedroom untouched, just in case. Julia’s sisters have been equally scarred. Lydia Delgado has sold herself for drugs countless times, though she’s been clean for years now; Claire Scott has just been paroled after knee-capping her tennis partner for a thoughtless remark. The evening that Claire’s ankle bracelet comes off, her architect husband, Paul, is callously murdered before her eyes and, without a moment's letup, she stumbles on a mountainous cache of snuff porn. Paul’s business partner, Adam Quinn, demands information from Claire and threatens her with dire consequences if she doesn’t deliver. The Dunwoody police prove as ineffectual as ever. FBI agent Fred Nolan is more suavely menacing than helpful. So Lydia and Claire, who’ve grown so far apart that they’re virtual strangers, are unwillingly thrown back on each other for help. Once she’s plunged you into this maelstrom, Slaughter shreds your own nerves along with those of the sisters, not simply by a parade of gruesome revelations—though she supplies them in abundance—but by peeling back layer after layer from beloved family members Claire and Lydia thought they knew. The results are harrowing.
Slaughter (Cop Town, 2014, etc.) is so uncompromising in following her blood trails to the darkest places imaginable that she makes most of her high-wire competition look pallid, formulaic, or just plain fake.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-242905-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015
Share your opinion of this book
More by Karin Slaughter
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Hey there, book lover.
We’re glad you found a book that interests you!
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.
Don’t fret. We’ll find you.