A detective who’s much different from Chandler’s Marlowe but equally unforgettable.
A Hollywood private eye’s on the case when a shooting puts him in the hospital and a councilman’s daughter in the morgue in Leptuch’s (Last of the Horse Pistols, 2013, etc.) latest thriller.
It’s 1950 in Los Angeles, and PI Jim Hedges’ meeting with Councilman Pat Ruxton is cut short when a single shot in a restaurant parking lot hits both Hedges and Ruxton’s daughter, Beatrix. Beatrix doesn’t make it, but the shooter’s target is unclear; possibilities include others in the vicinity, like Ruxton’s wife, Mamie, and Beatrix’s fiance, Eddie—or even Hedges himself. The detective, who was already looking into heroin junkie Eddie’s murky background, is now on the hunt for a killer. Hedges’ search has him bumping elbows with gangsters and vengeance-minded individuals, and more bodies will hit the ground before it’s finally over. This detective story takes full advantage of its Hollywood setting: Real-life mobster Mickey Cohen has a significant role in the plot, and Hedges earns clients from the movie business thanks to the discretion his front-door sign promises. The PI is refreshingly atypical and indelible; he doesn’t encounter a mysterious dame, spending most of his time with one he knows quite well—his new(ish) wife, Velvet (the book even opens with a description of how they met). And Hedges’ background, while not as dark as other gumshoes’, is appropriately inscrutable: He was shot back when he was a cop, not knowing if the bullet (which is still next to his heart) was from a gangster or his then-partner, Dworf, who’s working the Ruxton case. The mystery of Hedges’ tracking down the killer all but disappears once he finds the shooter at around the halfway point. The book continues to retain suspense (there are more murders), but thorough coverage of multiple characters’ perspectives makes readers privy to info that Hedges has yet to obtain and puts them well ahead of the detective. Dishy one-liners, however, crop up throughout, not just from the suave protagonist, who notes that the “slug” that killed Beatrix “must have hit her like a cement truck,” but from others as well, including Ruxton: He’s not worried about a man who “greased his own skids.”
A detective who’s much different from Chandler’s Marlowe but equally unforgettable.Pub Date: April 23, 2014
ISBN: 978-0991511105
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Capotuttidecapo Publishing Company
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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