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DESERT KILL

The action and descriptions in this haunting crime noir perfectly capture the beauty and brutality of its desert setting. Gerard (Hatteras Light, 1986) cleverly uses psychological insight and other, more conventional contemporary crime novel devices to great advantage while leaving many genre clichÇs behind. The story begins when English professor Roy Pope is asked by his uncle Paul, a Phoenix homicide detective, to identify what appears to be the mutilated body of Cindy Callison, a part-time student in one of Roy's classes who, when not studying, made her living as a stripper. As the investigation drags on, Roy's wife, Eileen, becomes suspicious of her spouse's involvement in the case. Did Roy have a thing for good-looking Cindy, and was the attraction mutual? While trying to unravel that murder, Paul unearths other bodies in a similar state of dismemberment. He also discovers that the first corpse was not Cindy but some unlucky stranger dressed in her clothes. Now a brutal psychopath stalks the mean streets of Phoenix while the mysterious Ms. Callison's whereabouts are still unknown. Throughout these grim proceedings, a narrator, presumably the murderer, ``broadcasts'' from what he or she calls Base Station, describing in cryptic terms his or her crimes and motivations. These transmissions subtly imbue the reader with a mounting sense of dread as the hunt for clues in the desert landscape seems increasingly futile. After the perpetrator's gruesome hiding place in an abandoned mine is discovered, the investigation gets closer to the killer while the killer gets closer to the investigators. Then, seizing upon a disturbance during which Paul is wounded, Eileen disappears. Going after his wife, Roy eventually confronts the abductor—whose identity has been cleverly hidden—in a claustrophobic, chilling climax beneath the desert. A solid, satisfying read.

Pub Date: July 22, 1994

ISBN: 0-688-12641-3

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1994

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A LITTLE LIFE

The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.

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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

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THE CATCHER IN THE RYE

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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