A solid crime story sharing the spotlight with a priest’s family and nagging doubts.
A man of God debates his next course of action when a penitent’s confession reveals startling information regarding a woman’s unsolved murder in this quiet mystery.
Anthony “Tony” Calabrese’s plan to propose to Angela Santino in 1987 has a cruel denouement when she dies in a liquor store robbery. A shattered Tony joins the priesthood, also having lost his father to cancer and his prospective baseball career to an injury. By 2000, he’s a respected figure in his New York community while staying true to his vows, even if he’s a social drinker and a rather prolific gambler. But it’s on a cruise with his family that Tony finds himself fighting temptation. While mom Teresa gets cozy with widower Paul Bathgate, Tony can’t deny his attraction to Paul’s daughter, Donna Banks. His priestly pledges are once against tested when he volunteers to serve as a New York Police Department chaplain, and Patrolman Andy Miller hints at pertinent information regarding a recent liquor store robbery. Andy elaborates in a later confession that he may have details about a similar crime, the very one that killed Angela years ago. Tony wants his detective brother-in-law, Johnny Sullivan, and Donna’s forensic specialist brother, Jeremy, to reexamine the cold case. The priest struggles with a way to tell the cops about a possibly incriminating gun without breaking the Seal of Confession by which he’s bound. There’s so much nuance in the novel that the mystery, which opens the story, becomes a subplot. Saulino (Framily, 2014) aptly develops Father Tony’s family, everyone getting together often to chew over the ongoing World Series or favorite episodes of Seinfeld. The forbidden romance between Tony and Donna is also forever on the priest’s mind, all the more challenging once physical allure evolves into admissions of love. Tony learning of a probable suspect in Angela’s murder and his resultant dilemma, though certainly intriguing, never fully overtake the plot from the protagonist’s other troubles. Saulino, meanwhile, packs his narrative with gleefully torrid drama: there’s a reason Paul fails to mention he has a son, while a husband implies something less than innocent between his parishioner wife and Tony.
A solid crime story sharing the spotlight with a priest’s family and nagging doubts.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5144-0301-3
Page Count: 190
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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