The author alters the stakes in this entertaining con artist tale and brings his characters full circle.
This sixth installment of a series finds the Traveling Man grifting alone while his partner enjoys a normal life.
The Traveling Man, a career con artist, is using the name Tony Rogers while in Mitchellville, Maryland. His wife, continuing under the alias Nicole, has opted for semiretirement with millionaire James Denison in San Francisco. Tony flies without his usual backup into the midst of lawyer Jerry Chen, National Defense Agent Paul Robertson, and several other conspirators who have stolen NGO aid funds from Kyrgyzstan. Chen plans to break into the safe of Clemens, the conspirator holding key bank account codes, to protect himself from being offed by someone killing members of the group. The attorney contacts Missy Grey, a player who calls Tony to crack the safe. The heist goes well until someone murders Duke and Barker, Tony’s partners, making it personal. Meanwhile, in San Francisco, Nicole battles the boredom of living straight by taking on Lily Crockett, a young apprentice criminal. Together they flirt and drink with men and joyride in stolen cars. But when Lily attempts a solo adventure, the callow con doesn’t escape the attention of her marks. They steal her purse and threaten to unravel her life, which forces Nicole to step in. In this latest volume of The Travelers series, King (The Kidnap Victim, 2018, etc.) maintains his svelte, addictive style despite a touch of nostalgia for his characters’ early days. As Nicole reminds Tony, “Money spends better when you have to steal it.” Denison can’t quite douse Nicole’s grifting fire, and she frequently tells him not to worry (“Just relax. This isn’t Cricket Bay”). The plot’s main thrill is seeing Tony in action alone among a half-dozen greedy backstabbers. There’s fresh tension here, as the author eventually proves that his con has “that old happiness” with Nicole and is “one step better than he was on his own.” From the elegiac tone, readers may suspect disaster in the final pages. Or will events leave the Travelers prepped for either the quiet life or another thrilling mark?
The author alters the stakes in this entertaining con artist tale and brings his characters full circle.Pub Date: Jan. 18, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-9993648-5-7
Page Count: 190
Publisher: Blurred Lines Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 9, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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
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