An engaging mystery that offers plenty of potential for a planned series.
IRS agent Mark Douglas will stop at nothing to find his boss’s killer in this debut novel.
This book’s subtitle is Tales of a Badass IRS Agent; usually, in popular culture, “badass” and “IRS” are mutually exclusive terms. The agency’s functionaries are generally portrayed as milquetoast, like Will Ferrell in the 2006 film Stranger than Fiction. Here, Mark Douglas refers to himself as a “glorified accountant,” but he’s also an ex-Marine who leads his “bang-squad,” “the United States government’s own repo men,” on raids to seize tax-cheats’ money or possessions in order to square them with Uncle Sam. One such raid opens the story, as the squad—including 30-year veteran Harry Salt, newbie Miguel, and “weird” Wooly Bob—recovers $15,500 hidden in a Colt 45 can. The group’s camaraderie is further illustrated in the next scene—a barroom brawl with a man they call the “Human Fire Hydrant” and five of his friends after he gets too handsy with the squad’s favorite waitress. These scenes are played for laughs, but as Douglas’ boss, Lila Everston, notes, “You boys love playing cowboys and tax evaders. But someone’s gonna get hurt one of these days.” Tragically, that someone is Lila, whom Douglas considers to be “the big sister I should have had.” He teams up with an FBI wonk with the nickname “Tightass” to avenge her death. Zaslove, an award-winning writer of children’s TV programming (including The New Adventures of Winnie the Pooh, for which he earned a Humanitas Prize), delivers a series launcher that’s decidedly and bracingly not for kids. There are several groanworthy punchlines, which can be taxing (“At least it wasn’t a six-foot, seven-inch albino Texan singing the aria from Mozart’s Don Giovanni and accompanying himself on a Peruvian goat’s-hoof rattle”). But for the most part, this inaugural case is pleasingly complex. Lila’s demise comes early, so she doesn’t make a very strong impression, but readers will still feel Douglas’ loss. While processing his anger, the protagonist recalls when he stood up to his abusive stepfather in what may be the book’s most effective section.
An engaging mystery that offers plenty of potential for a planned series.Pub Date: April 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9712374-8-3
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Aperient Press
Review Posted Online: July 12, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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