Thorp's latest blockbuster (Rainbow Drive, 1986, etc.) provides a fictional solution to the Green River murders that raged through the Pacific Northwest in the 1980's—and an explanation of why there was never any real-life solution to the 50-plus killings. Standing on the spot where one of the first prostitutes the killer favors is discovered, Det. Phil Boudreau (Seattle Vice) lucks into an unbelievably good hunch: The killer is a crazy woman-hater named Garrett Richard Lockman, a police buff who's already been convicted of conspiracy and theft. It doesn't do Boudreau any good to leap light-years ahead of his colleagues in the investigation, though, because of several complications that will string the case out for nearly ten years. Boudreau himself, who identifies this first known victim at the scene and who seems to have links to every streetwalker in Seattle, can't help becoming a suspect himself—especially after Betty Antonelli, a young student who briskly added him to her collection of police conquests, is found dead. More damagingly, Lockman turns out to be an informant for the county cops, who'll do anything to protect him from the local cops and the FBI. And Lockman isn't the only Green River killer: He kills to impress a series of ``male girlfriends,'' the first of whom begins a killing spree while Lockman's on an exasperatingly well-documented vacation. Obsessively determined to bring in Lockman (``one of the most evil human beings ever to draw breath in this country'') any way he can, Boudreau finds himself thwarted not only by his brothers in blue, but by the knowledge of forensic procedure and interrogation techniques that keeps letting Lockman slip away- -until a series of breaks allows Boudreau's task force to mete out summary justice in a suitably brutal way. Dark, windy, and thoroughly nasty, finally gathering the momentum of a train filled with a grotesque and horrific cargo. (First printing of 75,000)
Pub Date: July 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-449-90704-X
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1995
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
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
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
