The characters are thinly defined in this thriller, but the pace is nonstop.
The gritty violence of a human-trafficking ring in Atlanta takes center stage in the second volume of this romantic suspense series.
Kiernan-Lewis (Wit’s End, 2016, etc.) brings back the detective duo of Mia Kazmaroff and Jack Burton, whom she introduced in 2014’s Reckless. The two quickly find themselves in danger after they agree to help José, an injured Hispanic man; he escaped from kidnappers and is trying to find his abductee sister, Maria. Just hours after José bunks down in Jack’s house for the night, he’s murdered and the place is burned to the ground. Jack wants to find the killer, and Mia wants to hunt for Maria, who, it turns out, is undergoing a hellish experience as a sex slave. Naturally, the two goals dovetail. Jack is a former police officer and now a part-time personal chef; Mia is an unemployed civilian with an unusual gift: she’s “able to tell the history and genus of any object just by touching it.” They teamed up after working to solve the murder of Mia’s brother, Dave, who’d been Jack’s partner in the Atlanta police department. That’s about all the back story readers get about the couple; however, their underlying sexual tension and constant bickering—not to mention the appearance of a rival for Mia’s affection—keep their dance interesting. Ultimately, though, the overall lack of character development restricts the novel to surface-level action. This is a plot-driven thriller that offers constant twists—some expected but others unanticipated. Kiernan-Lewis offers enough red herrings to keep readers guessing, as almost all the bit players are potential suspects in the trafficking conspiracy. Are the leads provided by Liz Magnuson, the head of Atlantans Against Modern Slavery, legitimate? Is Trey Bowers from the Atlanta field office of Immigration and Customs Enforcement really a government agent? The final surprise should make fans want a sequel.
The characters are thinly defined in this thriller, but the pace is nonstop.Pub Date: June 16, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-5002-2128-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2016
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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