A fast-paced, smartly written crime story that’s only the first shot in what could be a high-octane series.
From Young (Off the Grid, 2013, etc.), an intense police procedural focusing on the murders of Sonoma County gang members orchestrated from within Pelican Bay State Prison, one of California’s maximum security facilities.
An execution-style murder goes down after dark at an abandoned winery. When police detective Tom Kagan arrives at the scene, he sees the gang-tatted dead body and thinks, “This death, like all the others, gives me a reason to live.” Did someone within the victim’s own organization––the Nuestra Familia––pull the trigger, or was the shooter a member of a rival Latino gang? Readers will know the answer (the book’s title is a clue) before Kagan and his crew do, but no matter; the novel is riveting from the opening shot to the parting rounds of bullets. As the body count rises inside and outside of Pelican Bay, Kagan’s reason to live expands to include protecting his wife against the vividly etched, evil man named Ghost. The chilling deadness of Ghost’s eyes and his proclamations haunt Kagan. A lifer, the prisoner exerts tremendous gang control behind bars and beyond them; he has “arms and legs out on the street.” Kagan, emotionally scarred from a past family tragedy, has a long-simmering personal stake in making sure Ghost gets his due instead of his dreams––“cloudless blue skies, long sandy beaches, and the best brews money could buy. And women. Plenty of women.” The author, a 26-year veteran of the Santa Rosa Police Department, writes convincingly about how gang members in and out of prison think; how they communicate with one another; and how they manipulate underlings, wives and other family members. He makes a convincing case that sometimes the only way a gang member can stay alive is to take someone’s “wind”––“to make sure he doesn’t breathe anymore.” Young is also fluent in police-speak—law enforcement procedures, dialogue and actions ring true—and character building: Female characters are smart, tough and capable, while relationships seem genuine, and clichéd male/female encounters are absent, in spite of the occasional whiff of perfume.
A fast-paced, smartly written crime story that’s only the first shot in what could be a high-octane series.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2012
ISBN: 978-0983266389
Page Count: 346
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Aug. 1, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2014
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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