An engaging hard-boiled adventure with a memorable protagonist.
Conary (Still a Bitch, 2015, etc.) introduces private investigator Rachel Cord in this hard-boiled detective novel.
Gulf War veteran Cord is a no-nonsense private investigator in the heartland, scraping by on missing persons cases and trying to save up for breast-reduction surgery. “My breasts are huge,” she explains with characteristic bluntness, but “they don’t get me the respect I feel I deserve.” She’s called in to investigate a rash of assaults near a local cross-dressing cabaret. A gang of burly men in tracksuits have been attacking its performers; the most recent victim is in a coma. Cord takes the case, even though she’s still involved in the search for a runaway: a 14-year-old girl with the body of a grown woman who reminds Cord of her younger self. “I think she’s ripe for exploitation,” fears the P.I. The girl’s father molested her in the past, and Cord thinks she may fall prey to the predatory elements of the city. As Cord tries to get a handle on both mysteries, she finds herself embroiled in all manner of crime and mayhem, dredging up past traumas and calling into question her own morality and sexuality. Conary writes Cord with a wonderfully aggressive brusqueness that fills every scene, even as it hints at a deep vulnerability. The slogan on her business card, from which the novel takes its name, is only a taste of her P.I. bravado. The novel rushes along at a pace that barely leaves any time to take in the noirish scenery, hopping from twist to twist with verve and alacrity. Most enjoyably, a cast of LGBT characters—including the concupiscent Cord—offers a welcome inversion of typical genre tropes. It places investigators, victims, and victimizers on a level playing field, explores their complexities, and reveals their humanity. While Conary is hardy reinventing the genre, she does manage to breathe some life into it, and Cord and her quarry are compelling enough to keep readers following along until the end.
An engaging hard-boiled adventure with a memorable protagonist.Pub Date: March 14, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-692-40751-6
Page Count: 214
Publisher: Equal Footing Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2015
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
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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