“Real life ain’t an Agatha Christie novel,” Miles sagely tells Charley after the final bell. And this case, which saves all...
Legal eagle Coughlin (The Judgment, 1997, etc.) has been dead nearly ten years, but his best-loved creation, alcoholic defense attorney Charley Sloan, lives on courtesy of Sorrells (Power of Attorney, not reviewed, etc.) in this undernourished courtroom drama.
You have to wonder about a client who phones you past three in the morning, ahead of the police, to say that he’s just found his wife dead in their bedroom, and Charley does wonder about hard-boiled novelist Miles Dane, a former bestseller who’d returned from New York to buy into the most exclusive neighborhood in his Michigan hometown of Pickeral Point before his flagging sales had made him ever more pressed for cash—until the slaying of his wife Diana, whom he has thousands of motives to murder. Charley’s suspicions don’t abate when Miles starts his first chat with Detective Chantall Denkenberg by revising the story he told Charley. And when another of Charley’s clients, the even more raffish landscaping thief Leon James Prouty, spins a tale of a suspicious car outside the Dane domain on the murder night and Miles reacts by shutting down, both Charley and his daughter Lisa—another alcoholic who’s fled her last year at Columbia Law to help out the father she barely knows—figure they’ve got their work cut out for them. The crucial break comes when they realize Miles is covering up for somebody, but since it’s a somebody he won’t identify and they can’t subpoena, they’re forced to go to trial with nothing but reasonable doubt, as a hostile judge lands punch after punch to Charley’s head in preparation for the inevitable 15th-round knockout.
“Real life ain’t an Agatha Christie novel,” Miles sagely tells Charley after the final bell. And this case, which saves all its surprises and reversals for the very last minute, is more like a well-known Christie short story, first published in, say, 1949.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2002
ISBN: 0-312-28066-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2002
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
Genetically engineered dinosaurs run amok in Crichton's new, vastly entertaining science thriller. From the introduction alone—a classically Crichton-clear discussion of the implications of biotechnological research—it's evident that the Harvard M.D. has bounced back from the science-fantasy silliness of Sphere (1987) for another taut reworking of the Frankenstein theme, as in The Andromeda Strain and The Terminal Man. Here, Dr. Frankenstein is aging billionaire John Hammond, whose monster is a manmade ecosystem based on a Costa Rican island. Designed as the world's ultimate theme park, the ecosystem boasts climate and flora of the Jurassic Age and—most spectacularly—15 varieties of dinosaurs, created by elaborate genetic engineering that Crichton explains in fascinating detail, rich with dino-lore and complete with graphics. Into the park, for a safety check before its opening, comes the novel's band of characters—who, though well drawn, double as symbolic types in this unsubtle morality play. Among them are hero Alan Grant, noble paleontologist; Hammond, venal and obsessed; amoral dino-designer Henry Wu; Hammond's two innocent grandchildren; and mathematician Ian Malcolm, who in long diatribes serves as Crichton's mouthpiece to lament the folly of science. Upon arrival, the visitors tour the park; meanwhile, an industrial spy steals some dino embryos by shutting down the island's power—and its security grid, allowing the beasts to run loose. The bulk of the remaining narrative consists of dinos—ferocious T. Rex's, voracious velociraptors, venom-spitting dilophosaurs—stalking, ripping, and eating the cast in fast, furious, and suspenseful set-pieces as the ecosystem spins apart. And can Grant prevent the dinos from escaping to the mainland to create unchecked havoc? Though intrusive, the moralizing rarely slows this tornado-paced tale, a slick package of info-thrills that's Crichton's most clever since Congo (1980)—and easily the most exciting dinosaur novel ever written. A sure-fire best-seller.
Pub Date: Nov. 7, 1990
ISBN: 0394588169
Page Count: 424
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1990
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