by Walter Marks ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 27, 2014
A fast-paced mystery with plenty of action and colorful characters, hampered by a few unlikely coincidences.
In Marks’ (Dangerous Behavior, 2014, etc.) latest thriller, a detective investigates a wealthy real estate developer’s disappearance, and uncovers a mystery involving the man’s wife and a mysterious hit man.
Former East Harlem detective Neil Jericho moved to Montauk, Long Island, to escape a tragic, career-altering case and to be near his ex-wife and daughter. He expected a prosaic life as a cop in the Hamptons, but instead, he becomes embroiled in a mysterious missing person case. Real estate mogul Burton “Burt” Lloyd Cascadden’s empire is on the verge of collapse. His plans to build a luxury waterfront apartment building in Brooklyn have been delayed due to a legal dispute; his funds are tied up in the project, and he’ll be ruined financially if he loses the lawsuit. At the same time, his marriage to his second wife, Susannah, is floundering, and he blames her for the “negative energy” affecting his finances. Burt hires a hit man named Mort to kill his wife, but before Mort can act, Burt disappears. Jericho catches the case, but his investigation is soon complicated by a second disappearance, as well as by his own growing attraction to Susannah. Does she know more than she’s admitting, and will she put his life in danger? Overall, this is a well-paced mystery; Marks provides his intriguing principal characters with solid backgrounds without lingering too long on irrelevant minutiae, and he puts the central mystery front and center from the start. The relationship between Jericho and Susannah gives the book a good, romantic spark. The whodunit initially seems straightforward, but it offers surprise twists that add further dimension to the characters. That said, the novel does suffer a bit from spotty editing; early in the novel, for example, Jericho mentions that his favorite charity, Doctors Without Borders, received the “Noble” Peace Prize, rather than the Nobel. Also, later in the story, Jericho rather conveniently appears at Susannah’s house right when she needs him, without ever explaining how he knew she was in danger.
A fast-paced mystery with plenty of action and colorful characters, hampered by a few unlikely coincidences.Pub Date: May 27, 2014
ISBN: 978-0990316107
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Top Tier Lit
Review Posted Online: Feb. 7, 2015
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 J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951
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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