Condon in top form with his fourth all-Prizzi novel. Just as Prizzi's Family (1986) was a prequel to Prizzi's Honor (1982), so this latest is a prequel to Prizzi's Glory (1988). Aging billionaire Henry Asbury, his investments collapsing, arranges to have himself ``kidnapped'' so that his young wife Julia can pay a $75-million tax-free ransom for him. Although Julia is in on the scam, she doesn't know that Henry's money is largely tied up with the Prizzi billions, that the whole scam is a Prizzi invention, with the rather amazing kidnapping (from a high-speed boat going 68 mph in Long Island Sound) to be carried off by Prizzi hoods. On the other hand, what Henry doesn't know is that Julia is the daughter of Prizzi enforcer Charley Partanna's chief assistant, known as ``The Plumber.'' So when Julia schemes to keep the $75 million, which the Prizzis see as rightfully theirs, they ice husband Henry, dump his body into the Sound, and leave her a widow. But somehow her claims escalate until a billion.four of Prizzi money seems headed directly into her purse. Thus Charley Partanna is dispatched to off Julia—but instead he falls for her just as she falls for him like electrons joining head-on in a supercollider and they begin hearing marriage bells. Charley, though, is still engaged to sleek, exiled Maerose, while the Prizzi family's top brain, Harvard-educated Edward C. Price (Eduardo Prizzi), has himself fallen for Julia and wants to shoehorn Charley Partanna out of the picture and marry Julia himself and save the family's billion.four (with interest). Will Julia choose Eduardo or Charley Partanna? We know from Prizzi's Glory that Charley at last marries Maerose and becomes Chief of Staff to Edward's President of the USA. A tangled web!
Pub Date: Feb. 2, 1994
ISBN: 0-517-59695-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1993
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
I loved it — and to my mind — it fits admirably an immediate need in our season's lists, — the need for a richly patterned story spun out of another layer of that peculiar underworld with which Steinbeck is at his best. Once again, as in Tortilla Flat, he makes no effort to stress "social significance". To be sure, one can strain at his underlying meanings and say that such people should not exist in today's plenty — but no one can argue that they wouldn't exist again tomorrow if eliminated today. Flotsam and jetsam of humanity, — the gang of boys who could get jobs but didn't except when emergency demanded — and then quit when the emergency passed. Lee's felicitous acquiescence to their thinly veiled urging that they become caretakers of his newly acquired shack; their neighbors in the deserted lot; Doc, high mogul of the marine laboratory, doctor to the neighborhood on occasion, beloved by all; and the others who made up the dregs of Cannery Row. The story builds up to first one and then another climax, as the boys plan a party for Doc. There's humor — and pathos — and sheer good story telling as the incidents unfold. The plot is tenuous, held together by the characters. But Steinbeck succeeds in making them human, likable, out of drawing but never in caricature. And one feels that to him, too, they are part of the flavor of a folk legend of today.
Pub Date: Jan. 2, 1944
ISBN: 0140187375
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1944
Novelist/historian Carr (The Devil's Soldier, 1991, etc.) combines his two preferred modes with a meaty, if overslung, serial- killer quest set in 1896 New York. A series of gruesome murders and mutilations of heartrendingly young prostitutes—boys dressed as girls—reunites three alumni of William James' pioneering Harvard psychology lectures: Times reporter John Schuyler Moore, eminent psychologist Dr. Laszlo Kreizler (called, after the fashion of the time, an ``alienist''), and New York Police Commissioner Theodore Roosevelt. Despite Moore's skepticism about Roosevelt's plan to put Kreizler on the case (``You'd be better off hiring an African witch doctor,'' he says about his old friend), Kreizler steadily compiles a profile of the killer based on a combination of forensic and psychological evidence. The man they're looking for is over six feet tall; about 30 years old; an expert mountaineer; either a priest or a man from a strongly religious background; a veteran of some time among Indians. As Moore tours Manhattan's nastiest nightspots and Kreizler's net closes around a suspect, Carr fills out his narrative with obligatory cameos by Lincoln Steffens, Jacob Riis, J.P. Morgan, Anthony Comstock, and Franz Boas, and didactic digressions on the rise of Bertillon measurements, fingerprints, the Census Bureau, and gourmet dining (courtesy of Delmonico's) in America. The result is somehow gripping yet lifeless, as evocative period detail jostles with a cast of characters who are, for the most part, as pallid as the murder victims. Still, it must be said that the motivation of the demented killer is worked out with chilling, pitying conviction. Unremarkable as a genre thriller, then, but highly satisfactory as fictionalized social history. (Film rights to Paramount; Literary Guild Alternate Selection)
Pub Date: April 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-679-41779-6
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1994
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