An impressive novel that gives fans of legal thrillers a rising star to follow.
In debut novelist Reeve’s (Starting with a Quart of Tomatoes, 2009) Seattle-set series starter, a young legal eagle finds himself tangled in a web of corporate intrigue and murder.
Twenty-nine-year-old Harmony Piper—an associate attorney at law firm Piper Whatcom & Hardcastle and the granddaughter of one of the named partners—is missing. She’s always been hardworking, extraordinarily reliable, and well-liked. Indeed, fellow associate Jack Hart, who’s a year younger than Harmony, is smitten with her. He becomes concerned when he notices a tiny spot of blood on the carpet of her office. Security tapes reveal that she left the building, crying, via the freight elevator at 2:11 a.m. the previous night. The police aren’t impressed with his investigations—until the next day, when Detective Anthony and Officer Oden arrive to report that the body of Harmony’s father, Humphrey Piper II, has been found stuffed into his own suitcase, which had been offloaded from a plane in Fukuoka, Japan. “It was a big bag,” notes Anthony. “And he was a little man.” Humphrey had established, and was running, the firm’s Asian division. In between writing legal briefs and interrogatories, Jack becomes immersed in the ensuing investigation, eventually putting his own life at risk. But as the body count increases, Harmony is nowhere to be found. Reeve is an attorney herself, and she packs this page-turner with enough legal maneuverings and insider jargon to keep most genre readers satisfied. She mixes in a healthy amount of Jack’s backstory as she unspools the complicated mystery plot, which occasionally stretches the limits of credulity; however, she keeps things running along at a consistent pace. Jack narrates the tale, and readers learn a lot about him early on when he tells the story of why he took in his “starving, mistrustful, half-psychotic” dog, Betsy, who’d followed him home: “I knew what it was like to be beaten up and abandoned.” His relationship with the quirky Betsy adds levity to the proceedings and provides some of the book’s most tender scenes.
An impressive novel that gives fans of legal thrillers a rising star to follow.Pub Date: April 29, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-980960-26-3
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Time Tunnel Media
Review Posted Online: Jan. 21, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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