A Doberman with a taste for human flesh and the voodoo-and- shopping-mad family who keep him well fed are somewhere near the center of Hoyt's (Darwin's Secret, Whoo?, etc.) Miami drug-trade thriller. ``Marimba'' is Miami slang for the drug business. It is also the name of the Martinez family pet, an excessively muscular Doberman. The upwardly mobile Cuban-American Martinezes—widowed mother, two sumptuous sisters, and baseball-crazy brother—have been keeping their doggie in shape with regular feedings of pieces of drug-dealers and undercover drug-agents. Devoutly religious Mother Martinez has brought together her passion for the Afro- Catholic saints-and-spirits cult of Santer°a with her profitable corner of the drug business, a service that involves sending her beautiful daughters out to vamp real and would-be marimba players as directed by a cocaine kingpin. The girls' victims become offerings on the altar of the family spirit and then go to feed the dog. These lovely people are only a small part of the astonishing corruption that pervades Miami. There is also major rot in the local police, some decay in the FBI, and a broad base of citizens who would trade their good names for drug profits in a minute. There is, however, an incorruptible senator in Washington with an interest in busting the trade, and she has her own agent on the scene—James Burlane, a pilot whose flying skills have attracted interest as far away as Colombia. Under deepest cover, Burlane has wormed his way into the heart of the marimba and concurrently become romantically involved with Katherine Donovan, the sister of a cocaine addict. Ms. Donovan has her own interest in the local economy. Ties up rather too neatly, but before that happens, there are hours of creepy, cynical, sophisticated thrills. Hoyt's rapacious Miamians leave you gasping.
Pub Date: July 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-312-85193-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1992
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
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The years pass by at a fast and steamy clip in Blume’s latest adult novel (Wifey, not reviewed; Smart Women, 1984) as two friends find loyalties and affections tested as they grow into young women. In sixth grade, when Victoria Weaver is asked by new girl Caitlin Somers to spend the summer with her on Martha’s Vineyard, her life changes forever. Victoria, or more commonly Vix, lives in a small house; her brother has muscular dystrophy; her mother is unhappy, and money is scarce. Caitlin, on the other hand, lives part of the year with her wealthy mother Phoebe, who’s just moved to Albuquerque, and summers with her father Lamb, equally affluent, on the Vineyard. The story of how this casual invitation turns the two girls into what they call "Summer sisters" is prefaced with a prologue in which Vix is asked by Caitlin to be her matron of honor. The years in between are related in brief segments by numerous characters, but mostly by Vix. Caitlin, determined never to be ordinary, is always testing the limits, and in adolescence falls hard for Von, an older construction worker, while Vix falls for his friend Bru. Blume knows the way kids and teens speak, but her two female leads are less credible as they reach adulthood. After high school, Caitlin travels the world and can’t understand why Vix, by now at Harvard on a scholarship and determined to have a better life than her mother has had, won’t drop out and join her. Though the wedding briefly revives Vix’s old feelings for Bru, whom Caitlin is marrying, Vix is soon in love with Gus, another old summer friend, and a more compatible match. But Caitlin, whose own demons have been hinted at, will not be so lucky. The dark and light sides of friendship breathlessly explored in a novel best saved for summer beachside reading.
Pub Date: May 8, 1998
ISBN: 0-385-32405-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1998
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
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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. 22, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
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