An often enjoyable romp, despite some awkward prose.
Sawyer (co-author: Other Arms, Other Eyes, 2016) offers a mystery/thriller set in modern-day New York City, featuring a couple under threat.
Meghan Joyce and Thomas Catherton Lockhart are both at turning points in their lives when they meet by chance. She’s just about given up on finding a decent man in New York; he’s just about given up on his own ability to be a decent man. He’s about to let himself fall off a cruise ship in the harbor when Joyce steps in and stops him; they quickly hit it off, but after a whirlwind year of romance, Lockhart informs Joyce he must break it off with her and never see her again. It turns out that the specific reason that he was going to end it all was because he’d become embroiled in the work of a nefarious multinational criminal named Locke Murdock. While trying to get himself out of the business and possibly make amends, Lockhart finds himself pursued by Murdock’s assassins—one of whom, Randall Yearwood, is a personal friend. Thus begins a chase around New York City, with Joyce sticking by Lockhart’s side; along the way, Joyce involves a man named Gil DeLeo, a shy chef who has a crush on her; and his friend, Barbara Anderson. There are a lot of fun elements in this story as it makes use of different settings around the city. Joyce, Lockhart, and Yearwood are all well-drawn characters; Joyce is shown to crave an escape from her dead-end job, Lockhart reveals a certain fussiness, and Randall is a hit man who never killed anyone whom he didn’t think deserved it. For the most part, this is a charming cat-and-mouse story, and it’s often amusing to watch the chase. However, the dialogue is sometimes clunky, as when Anderson tries to convince DeLeo of tawny-haired Joyce’s dangerousness by saying, “That woman might have a map of Ireland all over her face, but the capital city’s not Dublin, it’s Troublin’.” The descriptions can be overwrought, as when Sawyer says that Murdock’s “eyes harmonized well with his professionally jovial countenance.”
An often enjoyable romp, despite some awkward prose.Pub Date: June 24, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-9970719-9-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Dec. 27, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
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
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