A series that seemingly couldn’t get any better goes a little deeper; with Young at the helm, readers can’t lose.
Fleet and friends take to the sea to solve a maritime murder in Young’s (Fleeting Note, 2013, etc.) fourth entry in his one-of-a-kind comic mystery series.
When an admiral friend invites semiretired PI Enescu Fleet and sidekick John Hathaway to Astorbay, Canada, for an all-night game of poker aboard The Stacked Deck, they’re happy to accept. “After all,” quips Fleet, “What sort of Fleet would refuse the request of an admiral?” Hathaway is particularly pleased not to be “stumbling over grisly corpses or up to [his] elbows in potential killers” after a year full of bizarre murder cases. Maybe, for once, his fiancee, Lesley, Fleet’s daughter, Ate, and Fleet’s faithful Maltese, Pixie, will all get to enjoy a vacation. But a relaxing night just isn’t in the cards for our hapless narrator; no sooner has Hathaway flopped a full house than a man falls overboard and another is found stabbed. Out of the 10 card players there that night, it seems that one of them had a different sort of game in mind. Though much of the resulting case takes place on the island, the story is something of a nautical Ten Little Indians, with the players’ pasts bringing them to the table in similar fashion to the famous Christie novel. Just as in the other books in his series, Young plots this story brilliantly and tells it through the same affably lost Hathaway. Characteristic of his writing, Young’s book revels in wordplay and self-referential humor as the author shuffles through more playing-card puns than this review can deal. That’s not to say it’s all fun; from Ate’s childhood in the shadow of her famous father to the darker moments of the detective’s own past, the story takes readers deeper into Young’s characters than ever before. Though the humor occasionally borders on being too subtle for its own good, the gambit proves worth the risk by keeping the series fresh. As always, attentive readers will be well-rewarded.
A series that seemingly couldn’t get any better goes a little deeper; with Young at the helm, readers can’t lose.Pub Date: Aug. 25, 2014
ISBN: 978-0991232468
Page Count: 240
Publisher: MysteryCaper Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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
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