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FALSELY ACCUSED

Butch Karp has left the Manhattan D.A.'s office, but not the legal hot-seat, as this blistering novel of endless Big Apple corruption and coverups makes abundantly clear. Butch's client—a client he's taken on over the howls of his firm's colleagues, who prefer to hold their star litigator over the heads of their own handpicked enemies—is ex-Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Murray Selig, tossed out of office on trumped-up charges so risible that the Mayor and D.A. Sanford Bloom have to have something else in mind—something pretty dire. While Karp is gathering the ammunition to destroy the D.A.'s defense witnesses, his wife, Marlene Ciampi, also on the lam from the D.A.'s office, is fighting off her pushy friend, high-flying reporter Ariadne Stupenagel—busy working on a story on the shakedown of three New York cabbies who fortuitously died in police custody—long enough to set up her own agency serving women who need help enforcing protective legal orders against strangers or sadists or former lovers who are stalking them. Ciampi's highly effective vigilante tactics—heaven help the stalker she gets her teeth into—give Tanenbaum's tale a shot of welcome humor to counterbalance Ciampi's involvement with Isabella and Hector, a pair of wary refugee kids somebody has dumped at tough Mattie Duran's Women's Shelter. Amazingly, Tanenbaum manages to pull all four cases together—Selig's civil suit against the Mayor and the D.A., Stupenagel's investigation of the police shakedown, Ciampi's anti-stalking campaign, and the sorry tale of Isabella and Hector—and even finds a surprising new role for Karp and Ciampi's precocious seven-year-old daughter Lucy. After tossing Karp into the treacherous deeps of the Kennedy assassination (Corruption of Blood, 1995), Tanenbaum proves that his meticulous homework on questions of legal procedure and the best Chinese restaurant for an off-the-record conversation can turn the most preposterous conspiracy of his own into an electrifying page-turner.

Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1996

ISBN: 0-525-94168-1

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Dutton

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1996

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A LITTLE LIFE

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. 21, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015

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THE CATCHER IN THE RYE

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

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