An intense, undernourished psychodrama about a Chicago cop on the trail of the Collector, a contract killer of unwilling organ-donors. Actually, there are three stories here. In the first, Lt. Tony Tulio, widowed head of Special Victims (``dead people who got money''), bucks the corruption in Homicide and tries to talk public defender Marian Hannerty back into bed as he stalks the Collector, whose existence nobody believes in but him. Meanwhile, Marian's lover, rich, successful gallery owner Paul Harris, finally gets her into his own bed—a tryst sweetened by Harris's afterglow over the young woman whose body he's just dumped outside the hospital where mobster Arturo Alleo's daughter is dying of liver failure. When Sophia Alleo rejects the new liver and dies on the operating table, her enraged father goes after the Collector, but finds that his go-between—ex-pug Lenny Roman—is too loyal and too stupid to give up his name. And in this corner, Chicago's new Homicide detective, Jake Phillips, gets disgusted with his racist partner Jerry Moore and demands a transfer to Special Victims, where Tulio, who won the kid's admiration by decking Moore, is just waiting to warn him off before his own career goes up in smoke. (Don't hold your breath waiting for Jake to come back into the story.) First-novelist Gaitano sets the scene with authentically acrid Chicago cop atmosphere and an expert portrait of his burnt-out lawman, but his Collector (``he was not a psychotic, nor was he a serial killer. He killed for the art of it'') seems to come out of a different world, redolent of lending libraries and preadolescent fantasies.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-671-87014-9
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1993
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
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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