A pair of misfit private detectives ply their trade in present-day Chicago in this soft-boiled mystery.
Little, the author of Family Ghosts (2019), introduces two eccentrics with impressive detective skills who are opposites in appearance: Aberforth “Abe” Willard Allard, the divorced father of a 14-year-old daughter, is a lanky, sad-eyed legal genius, and C.S. “Duff” Duffy, the son of a C.S. Lewis fan, is short and stocky, like a former football player—although he’s never gotten close to a gridiron. Duff discovered three murdered bodies years ago, when he was a teenager, and has long suffered from serious obsessive-compulsive disorder, which derailed his promising academic career. Abe and Duff’s normal grind includes lots of legal work and occasional consults with police in which they wield their “weird-ass Sherlock Holmes power,” as one police detective puts it. The pair’s skills are tested when ex–CIA agent Mindy Jefferson gives them $50,000 as a retainer and challenges them to find her when she inevitably goes missing. Her mother, now deceased, had revealed that Mindy had a twin brother, adopted by another family at birth. But while trying to track him down, Mindy began to realize that she was being followed. When Mindy does, in fact, disappear, Abe and Duff must unravel the mystery. Over the course of this amusing novel, Little makes sure that the detectives’ quest and its resolution always provide readers with a fun page-turner. The two heroes both have intriguing backstories, and they both struggle, in different ways, with the niceties of navigating relationships with others. Especially poignant are Little’s accounts of Abe’s efforts to properly parent his growing daughter. These scenes, and the author’s generous application of sly humor throughout the story, effectively make Abe and Duff fully realized characters rather than merely nerdy caricatures.
A solid, well-constructed missing person case that features an appealing pair of quirky sleuths.Pub Date: Nov. 19, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-79472-350-4
Page Count: 246
Publisher: Lulu
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
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The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
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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. 22, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
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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
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
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