Occasionally long-winded but, nonetheless, a comic glimpse into the life of addiction.
A doorstopper-sized third novel from Keyes (Watermelon, 1998; Lucy Sullivan is Getting Married, 1999) exhibits her signature wit but is sometimes slowed by exposition.
From the family introduced in Keyes's first outing, we're introduced to Rachel as she's coming out of a New York hospital after a drug overdose, an episode she's just chalking up to another night of partying. And when her sister flies to New York to escort her home to Ireland to enter into a treatment center, she can't fathom what all the fuss is about. But thanks to Dad, who has virtually had her fired from her job, her boyfriend Luke, who breaks up with her, and childhood friend Brigit, who is kicking her out of their apartment, Rachel "decides" a holiday back home might be nice. And it's not just any treatment center, but the Cloisters, Ireland's own Betty Ford Clinic, filled with celebrities and offering what Rachel assumes will be a two-month vacation. How wrong she is. With not a rock star in sight, Rachel soon discovers that the Cloisters is a no-nonsense place, a little dingy and filled with middle-aged alcoholics (how depressing), druggies (how nasty), and an assortment of other addicts who are nothing like Rachel, just a fun-loving gal. Denial is the operative word, and Rachel soon discovers that it's everybody's modus operandi: to listen to the inmates, no one has a problem. Still, thanks to all-day therapy sessions and a Gestapo-like nun for a counselor, Rachel concedes that perhaps she overdid it on occasion, and when ex-boyfriend Luke comes to testify that her 24-hour drug use ruined their relationship, Rachel breaks down and begins to heal. Though she offers a lively cast, Keyes too often lets her pace slow when explaining the journey to acceptance and recovery, a damper on the story's humor and appeal.
Occasionally long-winded but, nonetheless, a comic glimpse into the life of addiction.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-688-18071-X
Page Count: 624
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Lincoln Rhyme, the quadriplegic criminalist of The Bone Collector (1997), returns to confront the uncannily resourceful killer who’s been hired to eliminate three witnesses in the last hours before their grand jury testimony. The first witness is no challenge for the Coffin Dancer, so dubbed after his distinctive tattoo: He simply plants a bomb on Hudson Air pilot/vice-president Edward Carney’s flight to Chicago and waits for the TV news. But Ed’s murder alerts the two other witnesses against millionaire entrepreneur-cum-weapons-stealer Phillip Hansen, and also alerts the NYPD and the FBI that both those witnesses—Ed’s widow, Hudson Air president Percey Clay, and her old friend and fellow-pilot Brit Hale—are on the hot seat. With 45 hours left before they’re scheduled to testify against Hansen, they bring Rhyme and his eyes and ears, New York cop Amelia Sachs, into the case. Their job: to gather enough information about the Coffin Dancer from trace evidence at the crime scene (for a start, scrapings from the tires of the emergency vehicles that responded to the Chicago crash) to nail him, or at least to predict his next move and head him off. The resulting game of cat and mouse is even more far-fetched than in The Bone Collector—both Rhyme and the Dancer are constantly subject to unbelievably timely hunches and brain waves that keep their deadly shuttlecock in play down to the wire—but just as grueling, as the Dancer keeps on inching closer to his targets by killing bystanders whose death scenes in turn provide Rhyme and Sachs with new, ever more precise evidence against him. Fair warning to newcomers: Author Deaver is just as cunning and deceptive as his killer; don’t assume he’s run out of tricks until you’ve run out of pages. For forensics buffs: Patricia Cornwell attached to a time bomb. For everybody else: irresistibly overheated melodrama, with more twists than Chubby Checker. (First printing of 100,000; Literary Guild main selection)
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-684-85285-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1998
Twenty-six tales by the 1982 Nobel Prize Winner, rearranged in roughly chronological order of writing. From the 1968 collection No One Writes to the Colonel come stories of the town of Macondo—about the much-delayed funeral of local sovereign Big Mamma, a dentist's revenge on the corrupt Mayor (extraction sans anesthetic), a priest who sees the Devil, a thief who robs the pool hall of its billiard balls. But the collection's standout—its title novella—is not included here. Likewise, the long title piece from the Leaf Storm collection (1972)—also about a Colonel—is omitted; but it does offer "The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World" and other beguiling fantasies. And, from 1978's Innocent Erendira And Other Stories comes an uneven mix of mystical fable and diffuse surrealism (some pieces dating, before English translation, from the 1940s or '50s). Much that's brilliant, some that's merely strange and fragmentary, and almost all enhanced by the translations of Gregory Rabassa and S. J. Bernstein.
Pub Date: Oct. 31, 1984
ISBN: 0060932686
Page Count: -
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1984
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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