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
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
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