A swift, entertaining tale with plenty of series potential.
A California businesswoman trains to be a tough, capable bodyguard in Quigley’s (Armed & Female, 2010, etc.) action thriller.
Thirty-two-year-old Justine Baron becomes a multimillionaire after selling her cosmetics company. Unfortunately, her wealth also makes her a target—even in her Palo Alto home, where a home invader attacks her and her photographer boyfriend, Scott Reddington. Justine manages to call the police, but the assailant gets away. At the scene of the crime, Detective Lily Marshall suggests that Justine might have fared better if she’d had a gun in her house. Later, Justine allows Lily to teach her how to use a firearm. The detective then sends her student to her own teacher—an enigmatic, highly secretive man named Don, who used to work for a special ops unit and the CIA. Don agrees to train Justine, but in return, she’ll have to do three months of work as a bodyguard to his clients. Later, Justine’s first assignment is to protect movie star Alyssa Stewart. Meanwhile, Justine’s adoptive mother, Lise Baron, a fashion industry mogul, is determined to find the person who broke into Justine’s home. She enlists the help of Eniko and Iya, two Ukrainians who once worked for the Russian FSB agency, and who now work as dominatrices. At the same time, Justine’s best friend, award-winning costume designer Danisha Howard, is increasingly suspicious of her fiance, Alessandro Stellini, a Hollywood producer. Danisha and her hacker pal, Ajit Pandeek, investigate Alessandro and uncover some shady connections. Later, Justine, Don, Eniko, and Iya team up against dangerous criminal types. Quigley manages to pack an impressive amount of material into this novel, including intriguing, detailed backstories for multiple female characters. Although Justine is the clear protagonist, there are instances when other players steal the spotlight from her. Eniko and Iya’s traumatic, shared past is decidedly more harrowing than Justine’s home invasion, and Danisha’s present-day fear of her fiance’s illicit deeds effectively ratchets up the suspense. This refreshing story also offers intriguing contrasts; for example, the dominatrices’ desire to kill the home invader is set against Justine’s obvious reluctance to do so. Although Justine’s training is, perhaps, a little too quick to be believable—she’s field-ready in just a couple of months—it does keep the story’s pace brisk. The action scenes are truly exceptional; at one point, for instance, Justine deftly blocks an irate actress’s “outstretched claws, then foot-swept her to the ground, rolled her over, and took a large zip tie from inside her belt.” Quigley adds moments of subtle mystery, as when one of Justine’s allies is introduced as a disembodied voice over communication devices. There are moments of erotica, as well, as when Don gives Justine orgasm-inducing tantric massages. Although Justine unquestionably loves Scott, the author leaves the door open to address her romantic dilemma in a potential sequel. Some readers may be shocked by the narrative’s explicit sexual elements, but the violence is relatively muted by genre standards.
A swift, entertaining tale with plenty of series potential.Pub Date: May 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-578-21732-1
Page Count: 318
Publisher: Grove Isle Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 21, 2019
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
Once again, Hilderbrand displays her gift for making us care most about her least likable characters.
Hilderbrand’s latest cautionary tale exposes the toxic—and hilarious—impact of gossip on even the most sophisticated of islands.
Eddie and Grace Pancik are known for their beautiful Nantucket home and grounds, financed with the profits from Eddie’s thriving real estate company (thriving before the crash of 2008, that is). Grace raises pedigreed hens and, with the help of hunky landscape architect Benton Coe, has achieved a lush paradise of fowl-friendly foliage. The Panciks’ teenage girls, Allegra and Hope, suffer invidious comparisons of their looks and sex appeal, although they're identical twins. The Panciks’ friends the Llewellyns (Madeline, a blocked novelist, and her airline-pilot husband, Trevor) invested $50,000, the lion’s share of Madeline’s last advance, in Eddie’s latest development. But Madeline, hard-pressed to come up with catalog copy, much less a new novel, is living in increasingly straightened circumstances, at least by Nantucket standards: she can only afford $2,000 per month on the apartment she rents in desperate hope that “a room of her own” will prime the creative pump. Construction on Eddie’s spec houses has stalled, thanks to the aforementioned crash. Grace, who has been nursing a crush on Benton for some time, gives in and a torrid affair ensues, which she ill-advisedly confides to Madeline after too many glasses of Screaming Eagle. With her agent and publisher dropping dire hints about clawing back her advance and Eddie “temporarily” unable to return the 50K, what’s a writer to do but to appropriate Grace’s adultery as fictional fodder? When Eddie is seen entering her apartment (to ask why she rented from a rival realtor), rumors spread about him and Madeline, and after the rival realtor sneaks a look at Madeline’s rough draft (which New York is hotly anticipating as “the Playboy Channel meets HGTV”), the island threatens to implode with prurient snark. No one is spared, not even Hilderbrand herself, “that other Nantucket novelist,” nor this magazine, “the notoriously cranky Kirkus.”
Once again, Hilderbrand displays her gift for making us care most about her least likable characters.Pub Date: June 16, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-316-33452-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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