A thriller with estimable lead characters and engrossing villains that make up for an occasionally muddled plot.
Espionage agencies again call upon a forensic dentist’s expertise when it appears that Adolf Hitler may have fathered two sons in Woods-Frankel’s (False Impressions, 2012) second book in his historical mystery series.
In 1992, Dr. Steve Landau, in Israel to give a lecture at the Mossad Forensic Institute, is enjoying vacation time with his girlfriend, forensic psychologist Nita Lazar. But his plans change when CIA agent Herb Robinson and KGB Col. Mischa Kovalyov tell him that they need his help. They need him to confirm recent intel that the buried body of Hitler isn’t actually the dictator at all. Steve’s forensic dental skills validate the suspicion, and additional information suggests that the late Soviet leader Josef Stalin, who was sterile, may have used Hitler’s semen to impregnate two women, who each had a son. With the FBI’s assistance, Steve and his colleagues track down one of the sons in America, a wealthy, dangerous arms dealer. This mystery/thriller revels in its alternative history, spending a large part of the book in a flashback focusing on Hitler at the end of World War II. Later, the story moves into the 1960s to focus on his sons, Josif and Iliyich, who take notably different paths in life. Initially, this section doesn’t move much beyond what Steve, Nita and Herb have already learned, but it’s enthralling nonetheless. Steve and Nita are engaging protagonists, adept with weapons and close-quarters combat, and they stubbornly refuse to abandon the investigation. But that investigation can be confusing at times; for example, it’s initially unclear why the search for Josif is so urgent, although it becomes clearer when they realize he may be planning an attack on the United States. The plot also sometimes relies on coincidence, such as the brothers’ convenient reunion in America. However, Woods-Frankel keeps the tension high by taking his heroes through a gunfight, a kidnapping, and a tragic death or two.
A thriller with estimable lead characters and engrossing villains that make up for an occasionally muddled plot.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 2014
ISBN: 978-1910105092
Page Count: 276
Publisher: Netherworld Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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