An intelligent, thought-provoking adventure story and a fine debut.
A tense debut action-thriller that hinges on a pair of related kidnappings.
At the start of Jacobs’ taut novel, Tsarina “Tsara” Abrams lives comfortably in the New England suburbs with her husband, David Adelman, and their two kids, Abbie and Josh. One day, she receives an engraved invitation from her uncle, businessman Castle Thornlocke, to attend a charity fundraiser at the palatial Thornlocke estate in Libertyville, N.H. The fundraiser is for a worthy cause, a cancer center, and Tsara’s brother Court has also been invited. Their relationship with their uncle has always been tense and adversarial, but it seems that Uncle Cass’ new wife, Alicia, has mellowed him somewhat, and Tsara believes that his invitation might be an attempt to mend fences. She makes the trip to the New Hampshire mountains, and at first, all seems well—but her first night under her uncle’s roof, she’s kidnapped by two men and brought to a remote cabin in the woods. They explain that her uncle is holding one of the kidnappers’ children hostage (along with half a dozen others’) in his estate’s wine cellar in order to coerce them into paying outstanding debts. Her uncle, it seems, is a ruthless power broker, with the corrupt local police entirely at his disposal, and Tsara’s desperate kidnappers see no alternative but to threaten him using similar methods. Jacobs presents the ensuing tense moral and tactical standoff with smooth skill and intense readability. Her sense of the New Hampshire landscape is vividly atmospheric (“The sky was azure, wisped with occasional brushes of clouds, and the trees were rocket bursts of fall color”), and her characters are refreshingly three-dimensional; by the end, Jacobs even makes a monstrous villain such as Thornlocke understandable, if not sympathetic. The novel is fast-paced right from the end of the first chapter, and the dialogue is crisply believable throughout. Fans of mystery writers such as Lisa Scottoline and William Kent Krueger will find much to entertain them here.
An intelligent, thought-provoking adventure story and a fine debut.Pub Date: June 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-0615805597
Page Count: 406
Publisher: Linden Tree Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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