by T.M. Hern ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 4, 2018
A darkly charming page-turner that offers familiar elements as well as wit and wisdom.
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A romantic thriller delves into the bleak emotions of a detective and an FBI agent.
Jagger Scott is the picture of a hard-boiled detective. Being orphaned and having to raise his younger sister, Sara, on his own are enough to justify a jaded worldview, but after the death of his wife, Jagger has gone from pessimism to full-on nihilism. He continues his work on the NYPD narcotics squad with zeal, but he barely gets through any given day. His characterization borders on cliché, from his bullheaded demeanor and disregard for rules to his deep emotional wounds and need for affection. The way he’s described also tells more than it shows and seems to be forcing the idea of romance rather than naturally building chemistry: “Extremely handsome didn’t cover his description. Lightly bearded, bad boy sexy. Brooding and smoky.” But when his sister ends up in a drug-induced coma, he has to jolt himself out of this depression and work to find the culprit before it’s too late. Jagger’s opposite is Peyton Morgan, an FBI agent on the trail of the serial killer who left Sara to die. Jagger’s out for blood, but Peyton is nearly as hardheaded as he is. Still, even as they run afoul of each other’s sharp edges, they find more common ground than they initially expected. Peyton, as it turns out, joined the FBI following the death of her husband and birth of her daughter, and the anguish and lonely tenderness the two share begin building toward something more even as the tension mounts and the killer remains at large. Like Jagger, Peyton is not a unique character, her determination and skill contrasting in a familiar manner with her tenderness toward her daughter, Charlotte. But while the characters, plotting, and premise all strike well-worn chords, Hern’s (Shivering Fear, 2018, etc.) execution elevates the thriller and makes it a treat for fans of the genre. The prose is solid and swift, full of movement and dialogue that keep scenes briskly paced. The characters have all the pithy exchanges and awkward misunderstandings that readers would expect, giving the romance a sense of fun despite the grim circumstances of the plot.
A darkly charming page-turner that offers familiar elements as well as wit and wisdom.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-980735-59-5
Page Count: 345
Publisher: Time Tunnel Media
Review Posted Online: Jan. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
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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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by Elin Hilderbrand ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 16, 2015
Once again, Hilderbrand displays her gift for making us care most about her least likable characters.
Hilderbrand’s latest cautionary tale exposes the toxic—and hilarious—impact of gossip on even the most sophisticated of islands.
Eddie and Grace Pancik are known for their beautiful Nantucket home and grounds, financed with the profits from Eddie’s thriving real estate company (thriving before the crash of 2008, that is). Grace raises pedigreed hens and, with the help of hunky landscape architect Benton Coe, has achieved a lush paradise of fowl-friendly foliage. The Panciks’ teenage girls, Allegra and Hope, suffer invidious comparisons of their looks and sex appeal, although they're identical twins. The Panciks’ friends the Llewellyns (Madeline, a blocked novelist, and her airline-pilot husband, Trevor) invested $50,000, the lion’s share of Madeline’s last advance, in Eddie’s latest development. But Madeline, hard-pressed to come up with catalog copy, much less a new novel, is living in increasingly straightened circumstances, at least by Nantucket standards: she can only afford $2,000 per month on the apartment she rents in desperate hope that “a room of her own” will prime the creative pump. Construction on Eddie’s spec houses has stalled, thanks to the aforementioned crash. Grace, who has been nursing a crush on Benton for some time, gives in and a torrid affair ensues, which she ill-advisedly confides to Madeline after too many glasses of Screaming Eagle. With her agent and publisher dropping dire hints about clawing back her advance and Eddie “temporarily” unable to return the 50K, what’s a writer to do but to appropriate Grace’s adultery as fictional fodder? When Eddie is seen entering her apartment (to ask why she rented from a rival realtor), rumors spread about him and Madeline, and after the rival realtor sneaks a look at Madeline’s rough draft (which New York is hotly anticipating as “the Playboy Channel meets HGTV”), the island threatens to implode with prurient snark. No one is spared, not even Hilderbrand herself, “that other Nantucket novelist,” nor this magazine, “the notoriously cranky Kirkus.”
Once again, Hilderbrand displays her gift for making us care most about her least likable characters.Pub Date: June 16, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-316-33452-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
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