The Brewer prose is clumsy, his characters nuance-free, but the Brewer (Monkey Man, 2006, etc.) plotting is operatic enough...
The family Sheffield: hugely rich and powerful—and murderously dysfunctional.
Solomon Gage well understands that something is rotten in the Sheffield state, but what’s a loyal retainer to do? He’s been serving the family for 20 years, since his mom left him on their doorstep, age 14, and can’t readily imagine another way of life. The position is precarious. True, Dominick, the patriarch, is a Solomon booster. He values Solomon’s trouble-shooting capabilities, and he has reason to. Is there a problem affecting Sheffield Enterprises? Dispatch Solomon—he’ll make it go away. Is young Abby Maynes, a third generation Sheffield, drugged out of her mind again and lost in some misbegotten needle park? Solomon will find and rescue her even if it means snuffing a few bottom-feeders in the process. So, yes, he’s earned Dominick’s gratitude, but what he’s earned from the Sheffield sons, Michael and Christopher, however, is implacable hatred fostered by long-standing resentment and jealousy. Inevitably, push comes to shove in a bitter battle between the pure of heart Solomon and the Iago-like sons with the godfather-like Dominick adjudicating between them. Well, blood is thicker than water, and virtue is its own reward—and somewhere in those homilies, Solomon ought to be able to parse his future.
The Brewer prose is clumsy, his characters nuance-free, but the Brewer (Monkey Man, 2006, etc.) plotting is operatic enough to counterbalance boredom.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-932557-61-9
Page Count: 370
Publisher: Bleak House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2007
A modern fairy tale that moves apace but is burdened by uneven writing and characters who continually do things that seem...
A feckless Englishman who’s just inherited wealth and a title finds purpose when he falls for his enigmatic cleaning lady, an Albanian refugee with a vast well of secrets.
Maxim Trevelyan has just lost his beloved older brother, Kit, and inherited his title as Earl of Trevethick. He also discovers his old house cleaner has left and been replaced by Alessia, a beautiful young woman from Albania who has little beyond the clothes on her back yet plays the piano like a superstar. She’s reticent and modest and came to England to escape the brutal man her father wanted her to marry only to fall into the hands of sex traffickers. She’s managed to find a job and shelter with her mother’s friend, but when she’s threatened, it’s clear that Max has suddenly developed a heightened sense of protectiveness. He’s falling in love with her. How could he not? She’s beautiful, talented, and courageous, having survived these horrors. But when one evil man after another tracks her down, Max will use every property and penny at his disposal, even go to the ends of the Earth—or at least across Europe—to save her. James offers her first book outside the staggeringly successful Fifty Shades of Grey (2012) world, and the story can be compelling, in a "Cinderella" meets Perils of Pauline kind of way. We root for Alessia to be saved by the rich, handsome Max, who suddenly cares about all the things he’s intentionally ignored his whole life, yet we also ask ourselves why a woman who escaped sex traffickers at a gas station can’t be smarter when she’s hiding from them in a mansion or when she’s being dragged back to her hometown by the man she fled from in the first place. It’s also worth noting in light of James' earlier books that while sex is an important theme—mainly Alessia’s sexual awakening and the threat of sexual violence—there's only the slightest hint of BDSM, when Max hooks up with a one-night stand early in the book, which highlights Alessia’s innocence.
A modern fairy tale that moves apace but is burdened by uneven writing and characters who continually do things that seem out of character.Pub Date: April 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-984898-32-6
Page Count: 498
Publisher: Vintage
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
A wild, brilliant ride.
The final segment of the Honey Badger Chronicles pairs middle sister Max MacKilligan with an oblivious jaguar shifter who attempts to save her and winds up finding himself.
When an attempted kidnapping of honey badger shifter Max goes south, ZeZé Vargas, one of the kidnappers who's a shifter though he doesn't know it, tries to protect her and is injured. After Max takes ZeZé home to New York and he heals, she's prepared to turn him loose, but her older sister, Charlie, demands she take some responsibility and help Zé navigate his new reality. “You brought him here, Max. You told him the truth. Now you need to deal with the repercussions of those actions.” Zé soon learns how unique the MacKilligan half sisters are. Fiercely loyal and superlethal when they choose to be, they mostly want to be left in peace. However, thanks to their idiot father and Max’s criminal mother, who’s recently escaped from prison, everyone wants something from them—information, money, or skills, for instance—pitting them against mercenaries, hostile family members, and even law enforcement. In the midst of the chaos, Zé begins to make sense of the sisters’ odd relationships with each other and the vast, unexpected network of friends and allies around them, and for the first time, he feels at home in his own skin and right where he’s supposed to be, with Max by his side. Laurenston ends the MacKilligan sisters trilogy with a flourish, blending humor, action, and romance in her own inimitable and fabulous fashion, and she reminds us that family can be blood or choice and that different races (Max is half Chinese; Charlie is African American; Zé is Latino) and species can get along when they decide to, aided at times by baked goods. A sprawling cast of shifters combined with an intricate, complex plot can occasionally be confusing, but everything comes together in the end, and the characters, worldbuilding, and storytelling are vivid, inventive, and completely entertaining.
A wild, brilliant ride.Pub Date: March 31, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-4967-1440-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Kensington
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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