An engaging tale with plenty of miscreants, sharp prose, and enjoyable characters.
In the second legal thriller in Reeve’s (All Good Things, 2018, etc.) series, drug dealers, corrupt cops, and a murder keep Seattle attorneys Jack Hart and Harmony Piper on their toes.
Jack is a lawyer at Piper, Whatcom & Hardcastle, as is Harmony, who’s still traumatized by the murder of her father, Humphrey Piper; later, she elects to work as an in-house attorney for Tokyo-based businessman Higuro Yamashita. Police officer Mark Oden, Jack’s former foster brother, has been working undercover in a heroin-distribution ring for the past three months, unbeknownst to Jack. Mark receives a call from his next-door neighbor Bobbie Ryan, whose husband, Garrett, has been abusing her. The next thing readers know, Garrett is dead, Bobbie is in shock, and Mark is found unconscious in the Ryan house with his service revolver in hand. A single bullet was fired from the gun—and it may be the one that ripped through Garrett’s head. Jack and Harmony are convinced that Mark has been framed, but by whom? The drug dealers? Mark’s father, who’s a drug kingpin in a separate organization? The police? Jack and Harmony are civil attorneys, so they must find an expert in criminal law to defend Mark. The section dealing with their search is like a short primer on what to look for in legal counsel—and what to avoid—when one’s life depends on it. Jack narrates this action-packed story, but Harmony proves to be the star of the courtroom scenes. This time around, Reeve develops Mark more fully as a character, and he and Harmony make a solid team for this continuing series. Betsy, a neurotic dog who followed Jack home last year—and never left—will be a special treat for canine aficionados. As Jack says succinctly, “there was something menacing about Betsy, as if she carried a rage that she might unleash at any moment. I loved her madly.” The twisty plot is satisfying but not overly complex. This entry works fine as a stand-alone, but it’s even better if one reads the previous book first.
An engaging tale with plenty of miscreants, sharp prose, and enjoyable characters.Pub Date: June 29, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-982940-71-3
Page Count: 255
Publisher: Time Tunnel Media
Review Posted Online: Feb. 13, 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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