A hyperactive ride for fans of high-octane fiction.
An engaging romp through the fast, furious world of professional motor sports.
South Florida novelist Ducote draws on her life as the globe-trotting wife of decorated race car driving professional Chapman Ducote in a bracing novel that swells with action and intrigue. Coleton Loren, one of Miami Beach’s fastest and most successful race car drivers, is handsome, shrewd and, for his chosen sport, uncharacteristically tall. His racing prowess has earned him not only fame but an opulent lifestyle that feeds his ego and his womanizing. Nothing, however, prepares him for an unexpected accident on the track that fractures his right leg. Although the injury jeopardizes his chances in the upcoming Le Mans racing series, it also introduces him to young, beautiful Dr. Camilla Harlow, commissioned to rehabilitate the dashing racer back to prime form. She soon finds herself unethically enamored of her needy patient, and embroiled in Loren’s adrenaline-fueled lifestyle. Ducote creatively portrays the story’s secondary characters, including Loren’s ruthless, former racing team owner Jose Gomez (who’s constantly at odds with Loren’s agent, Ira Goldstein); wealthy financier Arthur Elrod; and George Wachner, Loren’s longtime friend and an aging Le Mans pro driver, who’s reluctant to retire before defeating his nemesis, Klaus Ulrick. The story moves at a brisk clip and incorporates just enough sex, action, duplicity, murder and coast-to-coast melodrama to keep readers glued to the page. Ducote employs plenty of racing vernacular and knows the fast-paced, thrilling racing atmosphere well; she notes in her acknowledgments that many plot twists are derived from real-life events. At more than 400 pages, readers may find the story a bit bloated at times, and some of the prose a bit awkward, but those who enjoy a rollicking story full of twists, turns, action and romance will surely be satisfied. Ducote’s cliffhanger ending is a true shocker and hints at possible further installments in Coleton Loren’s wild world.
A hyperactive ride for fans of high-octane fiction.Pub Date: May 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-578-12199-4
Page Count: 415
Publisher: Warchest Publishing, LLC.
Review Posted Online: June 11, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An unusual and mesmerizing novel, gracefully written and deeply disturbing.
In her first novel to be published in English, South Korean writer Han divides a story about strange obsessions and metamorphosis into three parts, each with a distinct voice.
Yeong-hye and her husband drift through calm, unexceptional lives devoid of passion or anything that might disrupt their domestic routine until the day that Yeong-hye takes every piece of meat from the refrigerator, throws it away, and announces that she's become a vegetarian. Her decision is sudden and rigid, inexplicable to her family and a society where unconventional choices elicit distaste and concern that borders on fear. Yeong-hye tries to explain that she had a dream, a horrifying nightmare of bloody, intimate violence, and that's why she won't eat meat, but her husband and family remain perplexed and disturbed. As Yeong-hye sinks further into both nightmares and the conviction that she must transform herself into a different kind of being, her condition alters the lives of three members of her family—her husband, brother-in-law, and sister—forcing them to confront unsettling desires and the alarming possibility that even with the closest familiarity, people remain strangers. Each of these relatives claims a section of the novel, and each section is strikingly written, equally absorbing whether lush or emotionally bleak. The book insists on a reader’s attention, with an almost hypnotically serene atmosphere interrupted by surreal images and frighteningly recognizable moments of ordinary despair. Han writes convincingly of the disruptive power of longing and the choice to either embrace or deny it, using details that are nearly fantastical in their strangeness to cut to the heart of the very human experience of discovering that one is no longer content with life as it is.
An unusual and mesmerizing novel, gracefully written and deeply disturbing.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-553-44818-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2015
Less bleak than the subject matter might warrant—Hannah’s default outlook is sunny—but still, a wrenching depiction of war’s...
The traumatic homecoming of a wounded warrior.
The daughter of alcoholics who left her orphaned at 17, Jolene “Jo” Zarkades found her first stable family in the military: She’s served over two decades, first in the army, later with the National Guard. A helicopter pilot stationed near Seattle, Jo copes as competently at home, raising two daughters, Betsy and Lulu, while trying to dismiss her husband Michael’s increasing emotional distance. Jo’s mettle is sorely tested when Michael informs her flatly that he no longer loves her. Four-year-old Lulu clamors for attention while preteen Betsy, mean-girl-in-training, dismisses as dweeby her former best friend, Seth, son of Jo’s confidante and fellow pilot, Tami. Amid these challenges comes the ultimate one: Jo and Tami are deployed to Iraq. Michael, with the help of his mother, has to take over the household duties, and he rapidly learns that parenting is much harder than his wife made it look. As Michael prepares to defend a PTSD-afflicted veteran charged with Murder I for killing his wife during a dissociative blackout, he begins to understand what Jolene is facing and to revisit his true feelings for her. When her helicopter is shot down under insurgent fire, Jo rescues Tami from the wreck, but a young crewman is killed. Tami remains in a coma and Jo, whose leg has been amputated, returns home to a difficult rehabilitation on several fronts. Her nightmares in which she relives the crash and other horrors she witnessed, and her pain, have turned Jo into a person her daughters now fear (which in the case of bratty Betsy may not be such a bad thing). Jo can't forgive Michael for his rash words. Worse, she is beginning to remind Michael more and more of his homicide client. Characterization can be cursory: Michael’s earlier callousness, left largely unexplained, undercuts the pathos of his later change of heart.
Less bleak than the subject matter might warrant—Hannah’s default outlook is sunny—but still, a wrenching depiction of war’s aftermath.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-312-57720-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2012
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