A commendable follow-up with otherworldly action, down-to-earth melodrama, and sensuality in between.
An FBI agent’s devastated when she learns her boyfriend’s a supernatural warrior—and Lucifer’s son—in this second installment of a paranormal romance series.
Special agent Alexandra “Zan” O’Gara responds quickly to boyfriend Rainer Barakiel’s frantic phone call warning her that his enemies are coming after her. She defends herself and her apartment from what turn out to be “scaly, slobbering monsters.” But the biggest shock is Barakiel, who, upon his arrival, kills the beasts with superhuman speed. Barakiel’s a Covalent from another dimension who’s been vanquishing demons in the Earthly Realm for almost 1,300 years. Unfortunately, though he and Zan have been lovers for some time, he hasn’t quite gotten around to telling her what he truly is. Upset by Barakiel’s lies, Zan tries to end their relationship, but it’s far from easy. His evil father, Lucifer, has targeted his son and, aware of Barakiel’s love for Zan, will likely continue sending demons her way through dimensional rifts. Barakiel and his mentor, Pellus, suspect a traitor among the Covalent is helping Lucifer—a traveler, like Pellus, who can detect and navigate rifts. But regardless of how hard they try, deeply in love Zan and Barakiel simply can’t stay away from each other. Doyle (The Passion Season, 2016) deftly injects turbulence into the recurring couple’s romance: Zan’s distress is understandable, while Barakiel’s resultant behavior is akin to stalking, adamantly refusing to leave her alone even when she demands he do so. Their mutual allure is often purely physical, as that seems to be what’s continually drawing Zan back to Barakiel: “He’s so hot, I am going to die.” The sex scenes, however, are unquestionably ardent and provocative. A subplot involving Zan and her FBI partner, Mel Romani, working a human trafficking case is primarily a wrap-up, having started in the preceding novel. The possibility of a betrayer, meanwhile, is more intriguing, ultimately launching an explosive final act in which the Covalent and the feds rally together.
A commendable follow-up with otherworldly action, down-to-earth melodrama, and sensuality in between.Pub Date: Dec. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-9972985-1-2
Page Count: 412
Publisher: Fairhill Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 7, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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