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THE DEATH OF FRANK SINATRA

Name: THE DEATH OF FRANK SINATRA
Author: Michael Ventura
ISBN: 0-8050-3738-1

by Michael Ventura ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 1996

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Ventura's typically overwrought prose (The Zoo Where You're Fed to God, 1994, etc.) here competes with the recent spate of films about the same subject—that modern-day Babylon in the desert, Las Vegas. As usual, Ventura overlays lots of gonzo theology and cool-guy posturing on a plot that doesn't live up to its noir pretenses. Mike Rose—short for Rossellini—is a true child of Vegas, the son of a showgirl and a gangster. A private investigator in his 40s, Rose knows where the bodies are buried. After all, his pop (``Eddie Maybe'') was a hit-man who went bonkers after participating in the biggest hit of his career—the cleanup to the Kennedy assassination, a job that led to his own disappearance. Rose can keep a secret, even though his mentally disturbed brother, Alvi, can't—he blames their strange family history, including some old porno made by his mother, for his own odd behavior. It's Alvi's loose talk, overheard on one of his brief stays at home from the loony bin, that leads to Rose's current mess. It turns out that the family's best friend, another gangster named Zig, saw to Eddie Maybe's demise, an act for which he hopes to atone by arranging his own death at Rose's hand. The current mob boss, Gino Lampedusa, wants Rose and his brother eliminated, but so does another character who seems to come from left field, a computer entrepreneur whose wife has hired Rose to hide a stolen disk. For all its complications, the plot doesn't add up to much; it's mostly an excuse for Ventura to indulge his ideas about the Vegas mythos (with Sinatra as godhead) and to rue the waning of the old days, symbolized by the Dunes being torn down. Ventura punctuates his narrative with lots of gangster how- to's and some tiresome conspiracy riffs, none of which compensates for a sluggish story.

Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1996

ISBN: 0-8050-3738-1

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Henry Holt

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1996

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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SUMMER ISLAND

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2001

The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...

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Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.

Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.

The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.

Pub Date: March 1, 2001

ISBN: 0-609-60737-5

Page Count: 336

Publisher: Crown

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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LAST ORDERS

by Graham Swift ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 5, 1996

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Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.