A fresh concept and protagonist that breathe life into a conventional but exciting actioner.
In Marquis’ debut thriller, a man hoping to confront the author who plagiarized his unpublished work winds up in the middle of a CIA operation to take down Russian mobsters.
Unemployed geologist Nick Lassiter knows one thing for sure: the story portrayed in the new film Subterranean Storm is highly similar to his unpublished manuscript, Blind Thrust. Convinced that celebrated author Cameron Beckett, whose latest novel was the movie’s source text, pilfered his story, Nick and his pals head to New York. Nick just wants an apology from Beckett, but causing a scene at a book signing indirectly incites the Russian Mafia. They’ve got their hooks in Beckett’s agent, Anton De Benedictis, whose gambling brother has racked up significant debt. Nick’s CIA father, Austin Brewbaker, is working an operation involving De Benedictis and the Russians, but he struggles to keep his son, his son’s friends, and Nick’s ex-girlfriend—and CIA asset—Natalie Perkins safe. There’s a lot going on in Marquis’ book, as the author smartly builds off a solid premise. De Benedictis, for one, is also Natalie’s boss, while Nick has issues to work out with his ex as well as his estranged father. Nick’s initial goal seems over-the-top—he treks from Denver to the Big Apple just for Beckett to explain himself—but it’s actually quite reasonable. Nick is a realist and knows that a lawsuit against Beckett will likely go nowhere; readers, meanwhile, know without a doubt that Beckett indeed got his novel idea from Nick’s manuscript (courtesy of a slush pile). Russian thugs, with Alexei Popov at the helm, become a stronger presence in the story’s latter half, a decidedly more intense (albeit a smidge less original) turn that features Austin, and even Nick and Natalie, engaged in gunfights and a riveting car chase with the Russians. The story can occasionally be repetitive: Beckett is frequently compared to James Patterson, and Nick et al. either discuss their hastily created group (the title’s namesake) or chant its moniker a few too many times. Still, in Nick, unpublished authors have a formidable ally.
A fresh concept and protagonist that breathe life into a conventional but exciting actioner.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-943593-00-2
Page Count: 373
Publisher: Mountain Sopris Publishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
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.
