A spare and disturbing meditation on familial obligations and affections, by the prolific and unjustly neglected Canadian writer Cohen (Emotional Arithmetic, 1995, etc.). Set, like many of Cohen's previous novels, in and around modern-day Toronto, this latest story traces the increasingly tense and confused relations between two grown brothers: Paul, studious, a detached observer of life, and Henry, the elder, a rowdy mechanic with a taste for the high life. The two share memories of having preserved each other through childhood disasters. Their parents marriage founders; as adolescents, they are involved in a fatal auto accident. As adults, their tastes would seem to drive them apart (Henry has his own garage; Paul works in the serene precincts of a used- and rare-book shop), yet a series of curious events thrust them together. Paul has fallen in love with Judith, whom he meets at the bookstore. Seductive and self-destructive in equal measure, she insists that only Paul can save her from the seedy allure of Toronto's underworld. (When they first meet, she is a heroin addict.) Attempting to protect her, he is drawn into the orbit of Nicko Ross, a perverse, lethal, zestfully crooked cop. Henry, Paul discovers, has a complex, baffling relationship with Ross: Are they partners in crime? Does Henry owe Ross a considerable amount of money? In attempting to find out, and to save Henry, Paul discovers that his brother is, in many ways, a stranger, willfully, dangerously misleading him, and that Judith, despite her denials, may be involved in a violent affair with Nicko. Paul flees the city for the simple comforts of the countryside. Inevitably, though, he's drawn back to Toronto, incapable of letting the mysteries alone. A violent confrontation leads to murder, and to Paul's grieving acceptance of the complexities of the human heart. Concise, chilly work, an unblinking examination of the manner in which love and hate intertwine. Grim, but deeply compelling.
Pub Date: Aug. 15, 1996
ISBN: 0-312-14288-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
A convicted killer’s list of five people he wants dead runs the gamut from the wife he’s already had murdered to franchise heroine Ali Reynolds.
Back in the day, women came from all over to consult Santa Clarita fertility specialist Dr. Edward Gilchrist. Many of them left his care happily pregnant, never dreaming that the father of the babies they carried was none other than the physician himself, who donated his own sperm rather than that of the handsome, athletic, disease-free men pictured in his scrapbook. When Alexandra Munsey’s son, Evan, is laid low by the kidney disease he’s inherited from his biological father and she returns to Gilchrist in search of the donor’s medical records, the roof begins to fall in on him. By the time it’s done falling, he’s serving a life sentence in Folsom Prison for commissioning the death of his wife, Dawn, the former nurse and sometime egg donor who’d turned on him. With nothing left to lose, Gilchrist tattoos himself with the initials of five people he blames for his fall: Dawn; Leo Manuel Aurelio, the hit man he’d hired to dispose of her; Kaitlyn Todd, the nurse/receptionist who took Dawn’s place; Alex Munsey, whose search for records upset his apple cart; and Ali Reynolds, the TV reporter who’d helped put Alex in touch with the dozen other women who formed the Progeny Project because their children looked just like hers. No matter that Ali’s been out of both California and the news business for years; Gilchrist and his enablers know that revenge can’t possibly be served too cold. Wonder how far down that list they’ll get before Ali, aided once more by Frigg, the methodical but loose-cannon AI first introduced in Duel to the Death (2018), turns on them?
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how little the boundary-challenged AI, who gets into the case more or less inadvertently, differs from your standard human sidekick with issues.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5101-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
Irritatingly trite woman-in-periler from lawyer-turned-novelist Baldacci. Moving away from the White House and the white-shoe Washington law firms of his previous bestsellers (Absolute Power, 1996; Total Control, 1997), Baldacci comes up with LuAnn Tyler, a spunky, impossibly beautiful, white-trash truck stop waitress with a no-good husband and a terminally cute infant daughter in tow. Some months after the birth of Lisa, LuAnn gets a phone call summoning her to a make-shift office in an unrented storefront of the local shopping mall. There, she gets a Faustian offer from a Mr. Jackson, a monomaniacal, cross-dressing manipulator who apparently knows the winning numbers in the national lottery before the numbers are drawn. It seems that LuAnn fits the media profile of what a lottery winner should be—poor, undereducated but proud—and if she's willing to buy the right ticket at the right time and transfer most of her winnings to Jackson, she'll be able to retire in luxury. Jackson fails to inform her, however, that if she refuses his offer, he'll have her killed. Before that can happen, as luck would have it, LuAnn barely escapes death when one of husband Duane's drug deals goes bad. She hops on a first-class Amtrak sleeper to Manhattan with a hired executioner in pursuit. But executioner Charlie, one of Jackson's paid handlers, can't help but hear wedding bells when he sees LuAnn cooing with her daughter. Alas, a winning $100- million lottery drawing complicates things. Jackson spirits LuAnn and Lisa away to Sweden, with Charlie in pursuit. Never fear. Not only will LuAnn escape a series of increasingly violent predicaments, but she'll also outwit Jackson, pay an enormous tax bill to the IRS, and have enough left over to honeymoon in Switzerland. Too preposterous to work as feminine wish-fulfillment, too formulaic to be suspenseful. (Book-of-the-Month Club main selection)
Pub Date: Dec. 2, 1997
ISBN: 0-446-52259-7
Page Count: 528
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1997
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