A slyly provocative crime drama.
Carmichael’s (The Seen and the Unseen, 2014, etc.) murder mystery revolves around the discovery of a dead infant at the Supreme Court of the United States.
Detetive Sgt. Saxon of D.C. Homicide gets a call from Will Hazelton, an old college buddy and officer with the Supreme Court Police. His friend has news that’s as peculiar as it is grim: The body of a dead baby girl has been found in the courthouse. There’s no conclusive evidence suggesting how the infant got there or even if she died in utero or after birth. The initial list of suspects is forbiddingly long: At least 292 people had access to the place, including nine Supreme Court justices. The body was placed in front of the chair of Justice Mariana Martinez, whose unwavering commitment to abortion-rights jurisprudence is well-known; Saxon wonders if it was meant as a political statement. Also, the baby, like Martinez, is Hispanic. Later, Saxon discovers that the justice had recently organized a group tour of 16 Cuban nationals; the cop later becomes romantically involved with one of them despite the fact that she’s only 19. Judical clerk Susan Offerman, who’s also Hispanic, is anti-abortion and is immediately considered a suspect, but Saxon suspects that the FBI is attempting to frame her. Author Carmichael takes a titillating premise and deftly turns it into a marvelous thriller. Saxon is an intriguing mess of a man whose narration and dialogue are often very funny and wryly introspective: “You might be surprised, but I’ve had nothing but positive experiences when I date murder suspects….And the women I date are almost never the actual killer.” As the story goes on, it also offers a sensitive and intelligent treatment of the issue of abortion—at one point, Saxon’s ex-fiancee plans to terminate a pregnancy—while avoiding any hint of partisan proselytizing.
A slyly provocative crime drama.Pub Date: May 13, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-987667-84-4
Page Count: 318
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Oct. 12, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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
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