A brisk detective novel sequel that packs a punch.
Private eye Eli Quinn returns to track down the person controlling a drone used in a political assassination attempt in Britt’s (Closure, 2015) latest mystery.
Quinn, now an officially licensed private investigator, has one case under his belt and is currently waiting for his next client. He and his reporter pal, Samantha Marcos, brave a hot Arizona morning in the town of Pleasant to watch state senator Jackie Brand discuss her plan to end Sheriff Horace Otto’s program targeting undocumented immigrants. Volunteers, including Quinn’s buddy Jack “Beach” Beachum, handle security at the event but don’t anticipate a drone flying into the podium and exploding. The senator fortunately survives but ends up in a coma. Beach, wary of the sheriff’s apathy regarding any investigation, asks Quinn to look into it, passing along a clue: a homing device among the rubble that points to an inside job. Still, narrowing down the suspect list isn’t easy, as potential drone pilots could belong to the Desert Drone Club or could have studied at the Arizona Drone University flight school. Anti-immigration groups, too, strongly oppose Sen. Brand’s immigration policy. It isn’t long before Quinn thinks someone’s watching him, and soon, there’s a more overt threat: a muscle-bound thug who shows up at his house uninvited. Luckily, Quinn has backup—most notably, his trusty German shepherd companion, Solo. As in his previous novel, Britt hits the ground running in this relatively short tale. The expedited plot gets the PI on the case as soon as possible and generally works in the story’s favor; however, Quinn does lock onto suspects perhaps a little too swiftly. The series as a whole shows some progress, adding an ally in the form of hard-core gamer/CIA guy Pauly Peters and more formidable villains who can match Quinn’s taekwondo prowess. Solo is, again, irresistible, and his unspoken rapport with Quinn is even more engaging than the hints of romance between Quinn and Sam. One standout is the PI’s certainty that Solo is aware of an impending face-off against some baddies because people had “discussed the plan in front of him.” That said, there’s refreshing subtlety in the human couple’s slowly developing relationship, as well.
A brisk detective novel sequel that packs a punch.Pub Date: July 9, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-9977614-0-5
Page Count: 130
Publisher: Ink Spot Books
Review Posted Online: July 28, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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