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RETRIBUTION

Kill George Elgin's kid with an experimental drug and the morally numb Vietnam vet stops at nothing to exact his revenge. In his third thriller, ex-NYPD cop Grant (Officer Down, 1993) paints broadly: a white hat for the good guy, a black hat for the bad guy, with a Manhattan office tower at stake. The bad guy nearly steals the show. Michael Devlin, the new head of corporate security for Taggert Industries and an ex-cop himself, has all the resources money can buy to protect CEO Jason Taggert atop his 40-story fortress. Goaded in the boardroom and bedroom by Taggert's ruthless ``right-hand woman'' in charge of experimental drugs, Devlin hires professional security guards and off-duty former colleagues from the NYPD's elite TAC team to fend off crazed assassin Elgin. As Elgin closes in, Devlin readies every state-of-the-art gizmo from customized encryption software to elevators opened only by palm prints. He brings in a team of computer whizzes: a faux-Rasta giant of a black ex-con and a foul-mouthed computer hacker who happens to be the widow of Devlin's ex-partner. Can they get all 40 stories of their electronic fortress de-bugged in time to keep their security systems safe from Elgin? Problem is, George Elgin hacks into computers almost as well as he hacks up humans. Over three weeks, the body count approaches double figures, some of it imaginatively (Elgin is partial to dismemberment), and his ingenuity, courage, loyalty, tenacity, and deep but twisted sense of justice drive him almost to success against overwhelming odds. The full-bore action rises into a ludicrous made-for-Bruce-Willis climax on the 40th floor. Did it never occur to any of the top cops in the moonlighting TAC team that investigating George Elgin is their on- duty job, too? Don't read here for plausibility; Grant has the all the technical details right, but they go with a by-the-numbers plot as relentless as an elevator with every button pushed.

Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1995

ISBN: 0-06-017640-7

Page Count: 304

Publisher: HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1995

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A LITTLE LIFE

The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.

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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

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THE CATCHER IN THE RYE

A strict report, worthy of sympathy.

A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.

"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….

A strict report, worthy of sympathy.

Pub Date: June 15, 1951

ISBN: 0316769177

Page Count: -

Publisher: Little, Brown

Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951

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