by Nancy A. Hughes ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 27, 2018
An engrossing read that’s built around a chilling premise.
In this final volume of Hughes’ (Redeeming Trust, 2017, etc.) mystery trilogy, a married couple’s infant son is kidnapped and police are convinced that they’re responsible for his disappearance.
Kingsley Ward—whose first husband was murdered in the series opener, A Matter of Trust (2017), and who was a target of the murderer’s accomplice in the second installment—has finally found happiness with Todd Hennings, the president of Keynote National Bank, in central Pennsylvania. Married less than a year, the couple just celebrated the christening of their first child. Kingsley returns to work at Keynote, where she runs the commercial lending department. The company has an excellent child care facility with extraordinary security precautions. However, someone still manages to get past all the cameras, witnesses, and protocols to abduct 10-week-old Billy Hennings. The cops believe that Kingsley and Todd are somehow involved, so the couple is left to their own devices to find their baby before it’s too late. As they investigate, Kingsley realizes that Billy may not have been the kidnapper’s original target. With the help of two friends—Barrie Brown and her significant other, Randall Shannon—Kingsley and Todd begin their own investigation, which soon has them flying around the country. Readers are privy to information that the protagonists lack, so the challenge isn’t in understanding the motives for the kidnapping—it’s in figuring out how the plan was executed, and here, some intriguing twists emerge. Hughes constructs a meticulous scheme that involves many different players, and she employs solid description and engaging dialogue to keep the narrative moving along. Although the book is part of a series, it works just fine as a stand-alone. Kingsley is a well-defined character, even without the recaps of earlier novels, although Todd is relatively underdeveloped. Barrie and Randall’s relationship provides entertaining moments of light relief from the frightening primary storyline.
An engrossing read that’s built around a chilling premise.Pub Date: Oct. 27, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-64437-001-8
Page Count: 348
Publisher: Black Opal Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 16, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015
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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by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951
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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