An entertaining character study and effective thriller.
A law firm’s fixer finds himself on trial for murder after his latest job takes a deadly turn.
“ ‘We have this client with a…special request.’ Griff shook his head. ‘It always starts this way, doesn’t it?’ ” That’s how this series opener begins, and it’s a mostly auspicious one. Griffith Crowe is “a badass,” a “tall, dark and dangerous” former Navy SEAL and pilot whose past exploits are intriguingly hinted at when his college friend/fellow veteran/high-octane law firm rainmaker calls on him for another “sensitive matter.” “Am I going to regret this––again?” Crowe asks of the request to retrieve a $1 million Jackson Pollock painting purloined by Helena, a client’s ravishing ex-wife. Turns out that’s just a MacGuffin; the real assignment is to retrieve for Helena personal items that belonged to her recently deceased father, including his private journals. That part isn’t too taxing; the tricky bit is that once Crowe gets them, he and Helena become targets. Why? Perhaps her father’s helicopter mishap was not an accident. Suspects include Helena’s estranged half brother, who owns 50% of the shares in their father’s company. The company’s managing director owns a “tie-breaker” number of shares, but he is bumped off. And when a rising young associate at a law firm also winds up dead, Crowe is arrested. All that readers need to know about Bass’ (Murder by Munchausen, 2019, etc.) intended tone for the book can be glimpsed in the author’s photograph, which depicts the novelist pointing a gun at his typewriter. More often than not, his sentences achieve just the right temperature for hard boil, as in this scene setter: “A place where grand strategies” and harebrained “schemes were incubated, hatched and sometimes celebrated, sometimes autopsied.” Or this response when one character is asked about the rationale for shooting someone five times: “Because when I squeezed the trigger a sixth time, it just went click.” Crowe makes for a compelling enough leading man, but the novel’s breakout character is “crusty old country lawyer” E.L. Johnson. His enjoyable courtroom antics strike just the right Matlock note. The Pollock misdirection muddles things early on, and the banter between femme fatale Helena and Crowe is lame, but once those are dispensed with, the story twists and turns with ease. The sequel could use a little more polish and a lot more Johnson.
An entertaining character study and effective thriller.Pub Date: Oct. 22, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-946266-11-8
Page Count: 350
Publisher: Electron Alley Corporation
Review Posted Online: Oct. 11, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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