A meticulously drawn-out caper that retains suspense even during the planning stage.
To make up for the bungled heist of a priceless artifact, a special police officer agrees to swipe a 15th-century manuscript for a ruthless businessman in this thriller.
Lt. Norman Blalock has accepted a hefty sum to steal a historic item from his place of employment, the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. The theft doesn’t go as planned, resulting in an injured Norman stashing the artifact. Suspecting that his partner-in-crime, Kavitha Netram, attempted a double cross on their side deal, a bedridden Norman’s distrustful, even as his cohort is caring for his Great Dane, Bruno. The two, meanwhile, are certain the Englishman behind the deal, Rupert Whyte, is out of the picture, especially because his powerful boss didn’t get what he paid for. But when Whyte shows up in Washington, Kavitha makes a “peace offering”: the Voynich Manuscript will be on loan to the Folger, a book that trillionaire collector Wolfgang Von Essen desperately wants. Norman enlists his private investigator pal, Luther Kane, to research enigmatic Von Essen while devising a caper to retrieve the manuscript as well as the original artifact. Unfortunately, an Iranian assassin, for a reason back in London, is gunning for Whyte and may target anyone he believes is working with the businessman. Peterson’s (Nativity, 2016, etc.) story drops readers right into the plot, at the tail end of the botched heist. It’s initially baffling though exhilarating (at least one person’s dead before the night’s over), but enlightening specifics on Norman, Kavitha, etc. do slowly emerge. Recurring scenes in the Folger are highly evocative; the author himself works there and hilariously appears as a character to give Norman sound advice. Details, however, are occasionally excessive: Norman explains to Kavitha the card game Tonk in a dry, formal language, akin to instructions. (And Norman’s description of Tonk is nearly identical to the game’s Wikipedia entry.) But there’s plenty more to savor, from romance between Norman and Kavitha to the latter’s possible deceit—and all before the manuscript heist is under way.
A meticulously drawn-out caper that retains suspense even during the planning stage.Pub Date: April 27, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9891369-1-4
Page Count: 152
Publisher: Ram Press
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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