Addicting characters and gadgets.
A man’s new Dallas PI business becomes personal when someone abducts a loved one in Langer’s (Personal Verdict, 2011) thriller.
Jack Crocker can’t cope with his PTSD from the Gulf War and his time in Iraq. His struggle with alcohol is the reason his wife, Crystal, is seeking a divorce, and it indirectly caused the accident that crippled his young son. Remedying his mistakes starts with opening C&M Investigations, a PI agency, with his nephew (and former Marine) Jimmy McGuire. At first, business is slow, but things heat up when Meredith Thomas, the personal assistant to the CEO at Templeton Corporation, hires the duo to sleuth out who tried to run her over in the company parking lot. It only escalates from there: Meredith seems to be hiding from someone dangerous, and an employee at Templeton Corporation turns up dead. Then one of Jack’s family members is kidnapped to warn him off the case; now Jack just needs to figure out which case. Though the mystery takes a while to begin (Meredith appears about one-third of the way in), Langer fully develops his cast. Jack and Jimmy, for example, swap stories: Jack tells of inadvertently injuring his son, while Jimmy recalls a horrific experience in Afghanistan. But the character development also helps set up the story for later, more suspenseful sequences, like Jack getting little help from local police when he needs it. The book ultimately leads to an exhilarating scene in which Jack and Jimmy track down the mysterious abductors, who not only threaten his family, but Meredith as well. There are also welcome lighter moments, especially Jimmy’s obsession with gadgets; he puts to good use a Batmobile-esque remote-controlled car mounted with cameras and a recording device disguised as a pen. Langer only falters with his editing, including giving different names and job titles for the same murder victim. The ending, complete with epilogue, offers a thorough resolution.
Addicting characters and gadgets.Pub Date: July 8, 2014
ISBN: 978-0692240434
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Ralph\Langer
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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