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THE ROAD TO THE ISLAND

Name: THE ROAD TO THE ISLAND
Author: Tom Hazuka
ISBN: 1-882593-23-5

by Tom Hazuka ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 1998

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You can—t go home again, it seems, and newcomer Hazuka does a fair job of showing why not, provided that a certain number of clinkers, stretchers, and forcing of parts are willingly overlooked. When Jimmy Dolan’s father dies, hit by a car while jogging in the wee small hours, Jimmy comes home to Newfield, Connecticut, after an absence of four years and change. Fifteen years have passed since his 1971 high school graduation, but that’s still not long enough for some people (like his older brother Gary, for example?) to have stopped thinking of him as —Mr. Hot Shit Valedictorian,— and it’s not long enough, either, for Jimmy to have laid to rest whatever the terrible, awful memory was that made it impossible for him to stay in Newfield even though he had a job there and a wonderful new wife and a son, all left behind when he took off for keeps. The —mystery— is a disappointment when it’s finally revealed—as to credibility and as to being a motive for flight—but Hazuka seems willing to overlook its porousness so long as it fits a bigger pattern in the book. Jimmy is struggling with guilt, you see, and Roger, his best friend from childhood on, is struggling with it also, in his case associated partly with his tour of duty in Vietnam. In the few days of his visit, Jimmy gets to know his ex-wife Beth again (in more ways than one), his bottled-up but passionate mother, the tough but secretly insecure Gary, and his own seven-year-old son—through whom he remembers much of his own vanished past. The big news, though, isn—t only that best friend Roger and ex-wife Beth have become an item—but that there’s something more to the death of Jimmy’s father than seen or known at first. Soapiness aside, an often involving look back at a family, a town, and the lives in it.

Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998

ISBN: 1-882593-23-5

Page Count: 224

Publisher: Bridge Works

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
IF YOU TURN TO LOOK BACK
by Tom Hazuka

- BOOK REVIEW
IN THE CITY OF THE DISAPPEARED
by Tom Hazuka

- BOOK REVIEW
A CELESTIAL OMNIBUS
edited by J.P. Maney & Tom Hazuka

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WITHOUT FAIL

From the Jack Reacher series , Vol. 6

by Lee Child ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 2001

Relentlessly suspenseful and unexpectedly timely: just the thing for Dick Cheney’s bedside reading wherever he’s keeping...

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When the newly elected Vice President’s life is threatened, the Secret Service runs to nomadic soldier-of-fortune Jack Reacher (Echo Burning, 2001, etc.) in this razor-sharp update of The Day of the Jackal and In the Line of Fire that’s begging to be filmed.

Why Reacher? Because M.E. Froelich, head of the VP’s protection team, was once a colleague and lover of his late brother Joe, who’d impressed her with tales of Jack’s derring-do as an Army MP. Now Froelich and her Brooks Brothers–tailored boss Stuyvesant have been receiving a series of anonymous messages threatening the life of North Dakota Senator/Vice President–elect Brook Armstrong. Since the threats may be coming from within the Secret Service’s own ranks—if they aren’t, it’s hard to see how they’ve been getting delivered—they can’t afford an internal investigation. Hence the call to Reacher, who wastes no time in hooking up with his old friend Frances Neagley, another Army vet turned private eye, first to see whether he can figure out a way to assassinate Armstrong, then to head off whoever else is trying. It’s Reacher’s matter-of-fact gift to think of everything, from the most likely position a sniper would assume at Armstrong’s Thanksgiving visit to a homeless shelter to the telltale punctuation of one of the threats, and to pluck helpers from the tiny cast who can fill the remaining gaps because they aren’t idiots or stooges. And it’s Child’s gift to keep tightening the screws, even when nothing’s happening except the arrival of a series of unsigned letters, and to convey a sense of the blank impossibility of guarding any public figure from danger day after highly exposed day, and the dedication and heroism of the agents who take on this daunting job.

Relentlessly suspenseful and unexpectedly timely: just the thing for Dick Cheney’s bedside reading wherever he’s keeping himself these days.

Pub Date: May 1, 2001

ISBN: 0-399-14861-2

Page Count: 384

Publisher: Putnam

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2002

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE SECRET
by Lee Child & Andrew Child

- BOOK REVIEW
NO PLAN B
by Lee Child & Andrew Child

- BOOK REVIEW
BETTER OFF DEAD
by Lee Child & Andrew Child

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THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

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The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.