Possibilities abound in this meta-noir page-turner.
College grad Willie Tigue, “looking forward to an adventure,” gets one in spades when she is seemingly possessed by a freshly deceased private eye in 1940s Hollywood.
Meegs’ (First Blush, 2017, etc.) supernatural mystery takes a bit to get cooking as two nonconformist college grads contemplate their futures. Betty Moran is headed west to work for her uncle, private eye Skip Ryker. “Lost sheep” Willie Tigue is headed east for graduate school, but her heart isn’t in it. Betty has a better idea, and a dose of knockout drops later, she is off to the Big Apple with Willie’s identity and her treatise, and Willie is on the train to LA. This trading-places scenario might have made for an interesting yarn in its own right. Enter Skip Ryker, your classic hard-boiled Hollywood private detective. He drives a Packard Clipper “with three bullet holes embellishing the coachwork” and expects the worst in people (and “they usually come through for me”). Ryker cleans up messes for the Hollywood studios. But after an explosion separates him from his fingers, legs, and head, his spirit latches on to Willie. “Either I’m going completely dippy or I’ve acquired a narrator!” she writes to Betty. But there’s no rest for the newly empowered Willie. She sets out to solve Ryker’s murder under the guise of Trixie Moran. This apparent series launcher is nothing if not literate, often densely so. Early on, Betty and Willie ponder who was the first literary figure to urinate. Her stabs at Chandler-esqe prose are at times so florid (“I’d just got under the rudder when some fired-up sheba sent her feelers up from behind and gave my cerebellum a phrenological once-over”), one suspects the second coming of S.J. Perelman’s parodic homage, “Somewhere a Roscoe…,” complete with a luger’s ka-chows. But Meegs means business. Once Ryker’s disembodied spirit enters, the pages turn at a machine gun’s pace.
Possibilities abound in this meta-noir page-turner.Pub Date: May 21, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-938710-32-2
Page Count: 324
Publisher: Lycophos Press
Review Posted Online: April 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 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
Genetically engineered dinosaurs run amok in Crichton's new, vastly entertaining science thriller. From the introduction alone—a classically Crichton-clear discussion of the implications of biotechnological research—it's evident that the Harvard M.D. has bounced back from the science-fantasy silliness of Sphere (1987) for another taut reworking of the Frankenstein theme, as in The Andromeda Strain and The Terminal Man. Here, Dr. Frankenstein is aging billionaire John Hammond, whose monster is a manmade ecosystem based on a Costa Rican island. Designed as the world's ultimate theme park, the ecosystem boasts climate and flora of the Jurassic Age and—most spectacularly—15 varieties of dinosaurs, created by elaborate genetic engineering that Crichton explains in fascinating detail, rich with dino-lore and complete with graphics. Into the park, for a safety check before its opening, comes the novel's band of characters—who, though well drawn, double as symbolic types in this unsubtle morality play. Among them are hero Alan Grant, noble paleontologist; Hammond, venal and obsessed; amoral dino-designer Henry Wu; Hammond's two innocent grandchildren; and mathematician Ian Malcolm, who in long diatribes serves as Crichton's mouthpiece to lament the folly of science. Upon arrival, the visitors tour the park; meanwhile, an industrial spy steals some dino embryos by shutting down the island's power—and its security grid, allowing the beasts to run loose. The bulk of the remaining narrative consists of dinos—ferocious T. Rex's, voracious velociraptors, venom-spitting dilophosaurs—stalking, ripping, and eating the cast in fast, furious, and suspenseful set-pieces as the ecosystem spins apart. And can Grant prevent the dinos from escaping to the mainland to create unchecked havoc? Though intrusive, the moralizing rarely slows this tornado-paced tale, a slick package of info-thrills that's Crichton's most clever since Congo (1980)—and easily the most exciting dinosaur novel ever written. A sure-fire best-seller.
Pub Date: Nov. 7, 1990
ISBN: 0394588169
Page Count: 424
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1990
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