Written like a storyboard and riddled with coincidences.
A Neapolitan policeman goes to war in New York with the American branch of his hometown crime family, in the latest from the Law & Order writer/producer (Street Boys, 2002, etc.).
When Giancarlo LoManto was 15, his father died in the Bronx at the hands of the Camorra, the tougher-than-the-Mafia criminal outfit born under the Bourbons in 18th-century Naples. The late Sig. LoManto had failed to pay the vig and, well, you know how it is. Giancarlo’s mamma, understandably bitter, took her son back to the old country, where he grew up to be a spectacularly successful cop with a mission: to rid the world of the Camorra. He was actually doing pretty well, picking off drug dealers right and left, ducking most of the bullets that came his way, until, just as he was getting ready for a well-deserved, long-deferred holiday on Capri, his sister turns up with bad news. Her daughter Paula, Giancarlo’s high-school age niece, has gone missing, kidnapped from the New York family she was visiting. Giancarlo knows instantly that the kidnapping is a ploy instigated by Don Pietro Rossi, capo of the New York branch of the Camorra and son of the man who offed Giancarlo’s poor late father. Giancarlo has been much too successful in his one-man war on the Rossis, and the handsome young Don is seriously pissed. Flying immediately to New York, Giancarlo is teamed by a high-level cop friend, beautiful up-and-coming second-generation detective Jennifer Fabini, with whom he begins the hunt for Paula that will lead inevitably to a face-off with Pete Rossi. The adventure will bring memories of old grudges, scenes of old evils, much outwitting of lower-level thugs, and a sweet relationship with a savvy homeless Latino lad. There will also be Important Revelations about the shared past of the two antagonists.
Written like a storyboard and riddled with coincidences.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-41097-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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