A crime tale with a fierce, flawed heroine who surmounts plenty of perils and a few choice men.
In this sequel, a New Yorker with a past might not have a future after a vagrant’s gift puts her in mortal danger.
“What the hell do you wear to a funeral for a homeless guy?” Charley Anderson asks herself in the novel’s first sentence, immediately clueing readers to the main character’s irreverent attitude. An Upper East Sider, Metropolitan Museum of Art Board member, and multimillionaire, 40-year-old Charley suffers physical and emotional scars from a horrifying accident years earlier. Not to the manor born, Charley feels more comfortable talking to her doorman Carlton and Ben Williams, the homeless man always stationed outside her high-rise, than to the building’s residents. Upon learning of Ben’s death, Charley claims his body, pays for his burial (she’s the only gravesite visitor), and learns he left instructions to give her an envelope containing a pencil-written partial address, a key, remnants of a checkbook, and a girl’s faded photograph. Following the interment, Charley returns home to find a letter saying no harm will come to her if she turns over the contents of Ben’s envelope to a P.O. box. Soon Carlton, who had ties to the threatening letter, is found dead, his body tortured. A race ensues to find the lock that Ben’s key fits, the girl in his pocketed photo, and the culprit who killed Carlton before harm comes to Charley. Her chauffer, Jeff Jackson; private investigator Nash Pope and his team; and banker Joe Turner offer their assistance in keeping Charley safe and solving the mystery of why the contents of Ben’s envelope were cause for murder. (Joe also helps out in the bedroom.) Accounts of Met fundraising and artist name-dropping enrich Long’s (Scars, 2018) thriller. Representatives of various ages, ethnic backgrounds, social strata, and sexual preferences form a tapestry not unexpected in New York City but welcome in a novel. The author organically inserts revelations of Charley’s backstory from the series’ origin book. But the torture scenes are gratuitous, even if lithe, blond Charley, who can blind a man “with her bare hands,” is the one dealing out the pain. Believable dialogue and occasional humor pepper the narrative. And descriptions can be compelling: “She projected authority that made whoever sat in the facing chair feel extremely small.”
A crime tale with a fierce, flawed heroine who surmounts plenty of perils and a few choice men.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9991810-6-5
Page Count: 204
Publisher: Yellow City Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 31, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
Genetically engineered dinosaurs run amok in Crichton's new, vastly entertaining science thriller. From the introduction alone—a classically Crichton-clear discussion of the implications of biotechnological research—it's evident that the Harvard M.D. has bounced back from the science-fantasy silliness of Sphere (1987) for another taut reworking of the Frankenstein theme, as in The Andromeda Strain and The Terminal Man. Here, Dr. Frankenstein is aging billionaire John Hammond, whose monster is a manmade ecosystem based on a Costa Rican island. Designed as the world's ultimate theme park, the ecosystem boasts climate and flora of the Jurassic Age and—most spectacularly—15 varieties of dinosaurs, created by elaborate genetic engineering that Crichton explains in fascinating detail, rich with dino-lore and complete with graphics. Into the park, for a safety check before its opening, comes the novel's band of characters—who, though well drawn, double as symbolic types in this unsubtle morality play. Among them are hero Alan Grant, noble paleontologist; Hammond, venal and obsessed; amoral dino-designer Henry Wu; Hammond's two innocent grandchildren; and mathematician Ian Malcolm, who in long diatribes serves as Crichton's mouthpiece to lament the folly of science. Upon arrival, the visitors tour the park; meanwhile, an industrial spy steals some dino embryos by shutting down the island's power—and its security grid, allowing the beasts to run loose. The bulk of the remaining narrative consists of dinos—ferocious T. Rex's, voracious velociraptors, venom-spitting dilophosaurs—stalking, ripping, and eating the cast in fast, furious, and suspenseful set-pieces as the ecosystem spins apart. And can Grant prevent the dinos from escaping to the mainland to create unchecked havoc? Though intrusive, the moralizing rarely slows this tornado-paced tale, a slick package of info-thrills that's Crichton's most clever since Congo (1980)—and easily the most exciting dinosaur novel ever written. A sure-fire best-seller.
Pub Date: Nov. 7, 1990
ISBN: 0394588169
Page Count: 424
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1990
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
