Promising but affectless: a crime novel that sprints quickly into nowhere.
Cross-border action debut flares brightly but fades fast.
As an almost preternaturally skilled and efficient Mexican arms dealer and general badass, Santos de la O is hardly your typical gay protagonist. When we first meet him, Santos is putting together a deal to sell some über-sophisticated weaponry to kingpins from the El Paso-Ciudad Juarez cartel. Santos makes a mint off the deal and hopes to use the money to sweep himself and his new young lover, Tony, off to a happier life. Before that can happen, however, Tony gets gunned down in a hate crime, and Santos’ thoughts turn to revenge. To turn up the heat even more, Conner (who, we’re told, has “experience with and knowledge of sophisticated weaponry”) throws in the assassination of a DEA official by the same cartel boys Santos sold the weapons to, which puts Santos on the lam from both sides of the law. It also turns out that Tony’s killing wasn’t entirely random; in fact, the men behind it were part of a creepy organization of cops, servicemen, and militia types who like to hunt gays. Santos puts his talents for cold cruelty to work and sets about hunting down those who killed his lover. In the meantime, of course, this doesn’t prevent him from shacking up with young Fernando. All the right materials are here for an excellent thriller, but Conner’s amateurish hand betrays him. By throwing so much into the mix and connecting it all with so thin a skein of plot, he negates much of the impact a high-velocity story like this might normally cause.
Promising but affectless: a crime novel that sprints quickly into nowhere.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2002
ISBN: 1-55583-695-X
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Alyson
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2002
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
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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