Joe may be a good CFO, but he’s an even better detective and carries the mystery like a seasoned professional.
In Kelly’s (Hill Country Greed, 2013) second thriller featuring Joe Robbins, the chief financial officer is determined to connect a shady businessman to a drug cartel after Joe’s friend is murdered.
Joe’s content with his new gig as temporary CFO of Hill Country Capital, a real estate fund, but his best friend, Neil Blaney, isn’t so sure the company is kosher. Neil recommended Joe for the job, but now he’s worried about Kenji Tanaka, an investor for the firm, whom Neil suspects may be involved with drug smuggling. He digs into Kenji’s background, but someone puts a few bullets in Neil before he can tell Joe anything other than a cryptic “[h]e’s working with the cartels” as he dies. Joe picks up on an investigation Neil had already initiated, questioning a DEA agent and company employees. Very few people are forthcoming, which means that Joe’s friend may have stumbled onto something big—but also that Joe may be on his own. Murder initially seems to be just another subplot: The story begins like a drama, as Joe hopes to reunite with estranged wife, Rose, and daughters, Chandler and Callie, while helping Amity Jones, a prostitute, get into rehab, footing the bill when he can hardly afford it. But the mystery gradually takes the lead, and all of Joe’s struggles—from emotional to financial—affect his decisions as he works to solve the mystery. The capable protagonist had been a boxer and knows how to shoot a gun, so he’s more than prepared for an eventual confrontation. Joe’s wanting to repair his broken family is a worthy purpose, highlighted by several scenes with Chandler and Callie; he listens to the 10- and 8-year-old fight over who gets to talk to Daddy on the phone in a sequence that’s endearing without feeling contrived or too sappy. References to Kelly’s preceding novel are kept in check so readers unfamiliar with the series won’t be lost.
Joe may be a good CFO, but he’s an even better detective and carries the mystery like a seasoned professional.Pub Date: Oct. 22, 2014
ISBN: 978-0991103331
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Chaparral Press LLC
Review Posted Online: Dec. 31, 2014
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
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
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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