Touches of lowbrow comedy distract from an otherwise riveting, vengeance-fueled tale.
A reporter, in covering a story on soldiers who’ve died in Iraq, may have encountered someone seeking bloody retribution against supposed warmongers in this thriller.
News & Observer editor Karl Claxton is so affected by the death of his friends’ son that he assigns TV anchor–turned-reporter Rudy Ryan a series on late soldiers’ families. Rudy interviews subjects around North Carolina and, like the grieving loved ones, ultimately condemns the government for starting wars and sending troops to die. Some of the deaths, too, seemed preventable, especially ones happening at Army bases—faulty wiring, for example, results in a number of electrocutions. Rudy gets help from seasoned journalist Richard Landis and Richard’s daughter, April, who doubles as Rudy’s new romantic interest. At the same time, a string of mutilations ravages the country: someone shoots a Florida minister in the groin and mercilessly beats two men with a golf club. The attacks have links to soldiers, such as the golfing victims, who had taunted attendees of a funeral for homosexual Army sergeants. Rudy and April surmise that the assailant is one of Rudy’s interviewees, a person whose odd and aggressive behavior left the reporter “a little freaked.” And they anticipate the worst when their suspect shows up at a memorial event, The Cook Out, where the former vice president will be speaking. Riley (Executive Deception, 2011) injects mystery and suspense into his novel, including an initially hidden identity for the assailant, who certainly has the potential to become a killer. Rudy’s parallel story is decidedly lighter fare than the meticulously planned, violent attacks. Puerile humor is sometimes grating, like laughter or a quip accompanying nearly every mention of the groin injury. Rudy, too, can be flippant, jokingly claiming he wants to enlist when seeing women in “those tight camouflage tee shirts” not long after learning about the rape of female soldiers. The author only barely ties the reporter to the main plot, which might have ended the same way even without Rudy’s inclusion. The final few Rudy-less chapters, however, are the strongest, leading to an ambiguous but delectably ominous conclusion.
Touches of lowbrow comedy distract from an otherwise riveting, vengeance-fueled tale.Pub Date: May 11, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5078-7581-0
Page Count: 334
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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