A tense, well-realized police procedural starring a memorably resilient heroine.
A psychological thriller with spiritual overtones, set in Hawaii.
Lizbeth Hartz, the levelheaded and high-spirited heroine of this fiction debut by an author of the same name (in an Author’s Note, she mentions that the stories in her fictionalized memoir are drawn from real life), thinks her humdrum life of shuttling between a boring job and her ongoing search for a shining prince to sweep her off her feet has finally turned around. She has been hired as a dispatcher for Whaler Air Force Base in central Oahu, and among the many memorable characters she meets there is Vic Lazzarini, tall, tanned, soft-spoken, and courteous. Vic is the first male co-worker Liz has ever encountered who treats her with good humor and respect, and she begins to become comfortable daydreaming about him and innocently flirting with him (at first, she takes it no further, because she has a boyfriend). She’s far less comfortable around short, disreputable, slightly creepy Jaku Cardoza, an islander with an angry edge, and she can’t understand the friendship the two men seem to have. The plot catapults into action early on when Vic is found murdered, shot to death by none other than Jaku, who’s out on bail alarmingly soon and free to pose a danger to Liz. The author displays a wide array of skills in this taut, fast-paced novel. She’s adept at evoking the atmosphere and day-to-day feel of both contemporary Hawaii and the sometimes high-pressure world of a dispatch operator (the workplace drama elements of the book are well-handled throughout). Her characters feel fleshed-out even when they’re unsavory (Jaku is every bit as compelling as any of the less predictable “good guys,” for instance), and her dramatic sense for slowly, expertly unfolding the police investigation into Vic’s death is surefire. Her cops sound and act like real cops (usually a notorious weakness of novels like this). Readers should find the well-orchestrated climax satisfyingly gripping.
A tense, well-realized police procedural starring a memorably resilient heroine.Pub Date: April 19, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-615-98247-2
Page Count: 222
Publisher: Mighty Quill Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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