Cracking good crime thriller that resurrects both the gambling hero of Kakonis's Michigan Roll (1988) and the exhilaratingly tough yet deeply humane storytelling that made that first novel one of the most memorable in recent crime fiction. While his canny older partner Bennie Epstein is in Chicago trying to mollify Carl Dietz, the top mobster that Timothy Waverly burned for 500,000 ``balloons'' in Michigan Roll, Waverly is holed up in a shoddy Palm Beach motel—not the kind of place to show off to Caroline Crown, the childhood sweetheart he runs into on a nearby street. But Waverly soon has bigger concerns than a rekindled old flame, even if she is married to his oldest friend: Dietz wants to be paid back in full, with a heavy interest, and- -Waverly correctly suspects—plans to ice the gambler and his pal anyway after the two-week payback period is over. In fact, Dietz has set on Waverly's tail two shooters—anal-retentive, super-slick muscleman D'Marco Fontaine, and D'Marco's ``cross to bear,'' slobby, shlubby apprentice Sigurd Stumpley—whose odd-couple squabblings give the high-energy narrative some of the most inspired dark-slapstick moments this side of Carl Hiaasen. With D'Marco and Sig shadowing his every move, Waverly still manages bittersweetly to romance the unhappily married Caroline and to get her husband to introduce him to some high-rolling businessmen- -portrayed with an acid pen by Kakonis—and to their backer, a card-sharking-and-cheating Arab prince. In a series of high-tension poker marathons, Waverly watches his chance to pay back Dietz— who's meanwhile flown to Palm Beach to monitor the kill—rise and then fall to nothing—leading to a wild chase-and-shoot in a deserted hotel, and a brutal, high-body-count climax. Naggingly similar in plot to Michigan Roll, but even more inspired in its wry and compassionate portrait of desperate men: any way you cut it, this one comes up aces.
Pub Date: Aug. 27, 1991
ISBN: 0-525-93326-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1991
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
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