A fast-paced, multidimensional good ride–shaved just a hair, it has all the makings of a successful screenplay.
A bi-coastal nautical thriller with some surprise punches.
First-time novelist Chance pulls out all the stops in this murder mystery set mostly at the New Jersey shore. Just about every letter in the alphabet of criminal acts can be found in these pages: arson, assault, extortion, kidnapping, securities fraud, witness tampering and, for starters, one or two ripe examples of premeditated murder. It opens with Peter “Pete” Gordon, a recently divorced attorney who's left the chaos of Philly corporate law for the docile suburbs, musing on the horrors of drowning at sea with a little reminiscent foreshadowing of the drama to come. Just a day prior, billionaire Norman Hawkins had engaged Peter's services to help extract one of his sons from the evil clutches of an ultraconservative cult, but the next morning, Norman's body washes up onshore. The death, though seemingly accidental, piques Peter's curiosity, and he sets about unraveling the ornately tangled web that had become his deceased client's professional and personal life. In the process of discovering and then protecting Norman's interests, Peter crosses the country numerous times, endures a few life threatening attacks on his person, and encounters resistance at just about every turn when dealing with the brambly Hawkins heirs. The story, while preponderantly action-driven, is not without realistic characterization and engaging social commentary–the Poirot-like protagonist gracefully thinks through the most convoluted of malfeasance, and he's not opposed to mixing it up with political and corporate heavies, or taking to the water to outwit their Mafioso-like thugs.
A fast-paced, multidimensional good ride–shaved just a hair, it has all the makings of a successful screenplay.Pub Date: Dec. 30, 2004
ISBN: 1-4134-6994-9
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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