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BLINDERS

Name: BLINDERS
Author: Michael Amon

by Michael Amon ‧ RELEASE DATE: N/A

An Ocean’s 11–type tale of an intriguing oenophile underworld.

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A broke, blue blood gamester grooms a wine-savvy “rube” for a high-stakes tasting competition in this crime novel.

Nattily dressed Trilby is “toying with a glass of Crozes-Hermitage” in a New York City wine bar when a leggy beauty saunters in. After she orders a Gamay, a jeans-clad yokel named Bobby arrives and tries to flirt with her. She says that if he can tell her what she’s drinking by tasting it, she’ll provide her phone number. He surprisingly nails it, and she throws a glassful of wine in his face and storms off. Trilby springs into action and sets up a taste test (called a “blind”) for Bobby, who manages to identify a series of wines. The newcomer reveals that he recently arrived from Omaha, where his dad was in the wine business. Trilby then takes Bobby to a blind betting event, which he wins. This spurs Trilby to prepare his protégé for La Paulée, the top blind competition, run by shady Hong Kong-based Johnny Tan and coming soon to San Francisco. He trains Bobby using the wine cellar in his inherited, but now heavily mortgaged, brownstone. Bobby wins several run-up events, including one at Sotheby’s. There, Johnny is dazzled by Katya, a Russian billionaire’s daughter, who places a $200,000 bet on Bobby for the upcoming La Paulée. Worried about covering that gamble, Johnny brings in a one-eyed man, Sommurai, who bested Trilby at a previous competition, and blackmails La Paulée’s presiding judge to rig the event. Trilby waits to place his all-in bet until the eleventh hour, leading to a conclusion that prompts him to “cry and laugh simultaneously.” Debut novelist Amon brings plenty of Pulp Fiction–style punch to this rollicking story of wine-snob grifters. He relates the drugs-and-sex sleaze of Tan and his crew with gusto, as well as the mechanics of setting odds and other details of blinding events. The narrative moves frothily along with plenty of dramatic suspense, giving readers a growing sense of a looming double cross. Some readers may find the revelation of a major scam to be a bit far-fetched, and one character’s pedophilia pushes the envelope of acceptable edginess. Overall, however, Amon has crafted a fast-paced, entertaining caper.

An Ocean’s 11–type tale of an intriguing oenophile underworld.

Pub Date: N/A

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Dog Ear Publisher

Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2015

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

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NEVER LET ME GO

by Kazuo Ishiguro ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 11, 2005

A masterpiece of craftsmanship that offers an unparalleled emotional experience. Send a copy to the Swedish Academy.

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An ambitious scientific experiment wreaks horrendous toll in the Booker-winning British author’s disturbingly eloquent sixth novel (after When We Were Orphans, 2000).

Ishiguro’s narrator, identified only as Kath(y) H., speaks to us as a 31-year-old social worker of sorts, who’s completing her tenure as a “carer,” prior to becoming herself one of the “donors” whom she visits at various “recovery centers.” The setting is “England, late 1990s”—more than two decades after Kath was raised at a rural private school (Hailsham) whose students, all children of unspecified parentage, were sheltered, encouraged to develop their intellectual and especially artistic capabilities, and groomed to become donors. Visions of Brave New World and 1984 arise as Kath recalls in gradually and increasingly harrowing detail her friendships with fellow students Ruth and Tommy (the latter a sweet, though distractible boy prone to irrational temper tantrums), their “graduation” from Hailsham and years of comparative independence at a remote halfway house (the Cottages), the painful outcome of Ruth’s breakup with Tommy (whom Kath also loves), and the discovery the adult Kath and Tommy make when (while seeking a “deferral” from carer or donor status) they seek out Hailsham’s chastened “guardians” and receive confirmation of the limits long since placed on them. With perfect pacing and infinite subtlety, Ishiguro reveals exactly as much as we need to know about how efforts to regulate the future through genetic engineering create, control, then emotionlessly destroy very real, very human lives—without ever showing us the faces of the culpable, who have “tried to convince themselves. . . . That you were less than human, so it didn’t matter.” That this stunningly brilliant fiction echoes Caryl Churchill’s superb play A Number and Margaret Atwood’s celebrated dystopian novels in no way diminishes its originality and power.

A masterpiece of craftsmanship that offers an unparalleled emotional experience. Send a copy to the Swedish Academy.

Pub Date: April 11, 2005

ISBN: 1-4000-4339-5

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2005

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE SUMMER WE CROSSED EUROPE IN THE RAIN
by Kazuo Ishiguro ; illustrated by Bianca Bagnarelli

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KLARA AND THE SUN
by Kazuo Ishiguro

- BOOK REVIEW
THE BURIED GIANT
by Kazuo Ishiguro

- BOOK TO SCREEN
‘Never Let Me Go’ Series in the Works at FX

- AWARDS
Shortlists for TikTok Book Awards Are Revealed

- PERSPECTIVES
Best Books of the Century (So Far): Fiction

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THE HIGHWAY

by C.J. Box ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 30, 2013

Box handles this foolproof formula with complete assurance, keeping the pot at a full boil until the perfunctory,...

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The creator of Wyoming Fish and Game Warden Joe Pickett (Breaking Point, 2013, etc.) works the area around Yellowstone National Park in this stand-alone about a long-haul trucker with sex and murder on his mind.

The Lizard King, as he calls himself, normally targets lot lizards—prostitutes who work the parking lots adjacent to the rest stops that dot interstate highways. But he’s more than happy to move up to a higher class of victim when he runs across the Sullivan sisters. Danielle, 18, and Gracie, 16, are supposed to be driving from their mother’s home in Denver to their father’s in Omaha, but Danielle has had the bright idea of heading instead to Bozeman, Mont., to visit her boyfriend, Justin Hoyt. Far from home, their whereabouts known to only a few people, the girls are the perfect victims even before they nearly collide with the Lizard King’s rig and Danielle flips him off. Hours later, very shortly after he’s caught up with them in the depths of Yellowstone and done his best to eradicate every trace of his abduction, Justin, worried that Danielle refused his last phone call, tells his father that something bad has happened. Cody Hoyt, an investigator for the Lewis and Clark County Sheriff’s Department, is already having a tough day: At the insistence of his crooked boss, Sheriff Tubman, his longtime student and new partner, Cassandra Dewell, has just caught him planting evidence in an unrelated murder, and he’s been suspended from his job. If he’s lost his badge, though, Cody’s got plenty of time on his hands to drive downstate and meet with State Trooper Rick Legerski, the ex-husband of his dispatcher’s sister, to talk about what to do next. And so the countdown begins.

Box handles this foolproof formula with complete assurance, keeping the pot at a full boil until the perfunctory, anticlimactic and unsatisfactory ending.