A reporter's juicy nightmare: Miami Citizen scribe Sherry Estabrook, investigating drugs in a local high school, meets 16-year- old Manuel Velo, who tells her he's iced 18 people (he thinks it's 18) for Mimi Lopez's mob. Of course it doesn't sound like a nightmare to Sherry and her sidekick Belinda McEvoy, who are dreaming of Pulitzers before Sherry can even set up the first taped interview with Manuel. But as Sherry- -still trying (courtesy of endless flashbacks) to use this story to get even with her unloving Boston father, Judge Estabrook—is running Manuel's sordid, matter-of-fact revelations through a lie-detector test, driving him around to revisit the scenes of his hits, and swallowing his tale of wanting to start a new life away from the mob, she's overlooking screamingly telltale signs: Manuel's lack of remorse for his crimes, his obsessive attraction to her, and incidentally her sometime lover Brazil's newfound devotion to his hardscrabble wife Jeanie, and Belinda's unlikely romance with Officer Eladio Alvarez. All guarantee that Sherry's life is about to go into a horrifying, lonely tailspin. After chapters and chapters of painful teasing—it's in this queasy-making middle section that first-novelist Wetlaufer really shines—Manuel tries to consolidate what he thinks is his romance with Sherry by executing two pesky neighbors who'd killed her cat, and the book promptly goes over the top with a whirlwind of threats, betrayals, counterplots, sleepless nights—and one final midnight meeting between Sherry and Manuel, whose heart-rending denouement is reassuringly predictable. Like Manuel, Wetlaufer goes for the jugular; there's more subtlety in a tabloid headline. A lot of people, even if they don't wait for the reported movie, are going to swallow this overripe fantasy at a sitting.
Pub Date: July 16, 1992
ISBN: 0-688-10930-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1992
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
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
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