A thoroughly riveting Hollywood story of lies, back-stabbing, and murder.
In Barry’s thriller, a TV writer complicates his life when investigating a suspicious death that has ties to the prospective web series he’s currently a part of.
Conor Fallon has played the Hollywood game, disillusioned by others’ stealing his stories and ideas. Now (apparently the late 1990s), he’s barely scraping by in Los Angeles with a temp job, trying to support his wife, Juliet, and their infant son at home. So when Rand Bainreich, an old colleague, offers him a writing gig for a new series, Conor is simultaneously excited and wary. Mystery of Cydonia is, according to Rand, the first of its kind: an internet series for the website Sci-Fi Nexus. Conor has his eyes peeled for red flags, including the fact that the show’s premise is the same idea he pitched to Rand a couple of years prior. Meanwhile, the writer is fascinated by the recent death of actress Pamela Davenport. With details from newscaster friend Cal Reyburn, Conor learns that her death, initially believed to be accidental, shows indications of foul play. After realizing that Pam had originally been cast in Cydonia, he slowly discovers specific connections between her and individual crew members, leading Conor to surmise he’s working with a murderer. Barry (Sub Rosa: The Lost Formula, 2016, etc.) based his novel partly on his time as a Hollywood writer. The story is at its best with the TV show; Conor is perpetually on guard for duplicity, such as the indefinite withholding of his paycheck so that he works for free. There’s a successful fusion of fictional and real-life TV shows and movies, which adds realism to a tale set in Hollywood. Some of the titles are humorous parodies, including Saturday Night Boogie and Star Trails, for which Conor wrote (Barry has written for Star Trek). The concurrent murder plot is less engaging, though Barry keeps it simple, allowing the Cydonia storyline to shine. The taut prose furthermore ensures the narrative, rife with potential killers, never bores.
A thoroughly riveting Hollywood story of lies, back-stabbing, and murder.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-0-9960809-6-5
Page Count: -
Publisher: Sator Rotas Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 2, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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