An engaging thriller that highlights the universality of love.
An Internet-age murder mystery with a modern edge.
LeRoy’s debut novel takes readers back to 1998, when the onslaught of online communication presented new forms of social interaction. But the light whimsy of chat rooms and cyber encounters turns dark when a man hoping to meet his new love interest in person instead ends up dead. Johnny D’Agostino’s computer reveals a series of effusive emails between himself (“JohnnyD”) and Frankie Fitzgerald (“Frankie007”); the last one indicates an agreed-upon romantic rendezvous at the Triton Babies fountain at the Boston Public Garden. Detective Peter Angelo, a friend of Johnny, is assigned to the case, and must separate his grief from the task of tracking down Frankie and getting to the bottom of the mystery. But Peter has other suspects to weed through: He soon discovers that Frankie’s jealous lover, Matt, was aware of the virtual courtship and might have played a role in ending Johnny’s life. Matt has mysteriously vanished, and Peter’s determined to track him down in order to see justice served. As both men end up pursuing the same woman, however, their desire for her escalates, blinding both men to precautions and safety. At the core of the mystery lies the bigger conundrum of Johnny himself; as is often true in the faceless world of the Internet, each character’s outward persona differs from his or her inner core. The complex entanglements between Frankie, Johnny, Matt and Peter reflect the novel’s theme: that love is difficult in all its forms. Despite the central relationship’s virtual quality, it contains the same seeds of envy and revenge as a real-life love affair. Overall, this gripping tale of suspense and romance, told via the alternating viewpoints of Peter and Matt, deeply explores timeless themes of obsession and jealousy.
An engaging thriller that highlights the universality of love.Pub Date: Oct. 16, 2013
ISBN: 978-0615901084
Page Count: 420
Publisher: Mossik Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 21, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Steinbeck's peculiarly intense simplicity of technique is admirably displayed in this vignette — a simple, tragic tale of Mexican little people, a story retold by the pearl divers of a fishing hamlet until it has the quality of folk legend. A young couple content with the humble living allowed them by the syndicate which controls the sale of the mediocre pearls ordinarily found, find their happiness shattered when their baby boy is stung by a scorpion. They dare brave the terrors of a foreign doctor, only to be turned away when all they can offer in payment is spurned. Then comes the miracle. Kino find a great pearl. The future looks bright again. The baby is responding to the treatment his mother had given. But with the pearl, evil enters the hearts of men:- ambition beyond his station emboldens Kino to turn down the price offered by the dealers- he determines to go to the capital for a better market; the doctor, hearing of the pearl, plants the seed of doubt and superstition, endangering the child's life, so that he may get his rake-off; the neighbors and the strangers turn against Kino, burn his hut, ransack his premises, attack him in the dark — and when he kills, in defense, trail him to the mountain hiding place- and kill the child. Then- and then only- does he concede defeat. In sorrow and humility, he returns with his Juana to the ways of his people; the pearl is thrown into the sea.... A parable, this, with no attempt to add to its simple pattern.
Pub Date: Nov. 24, 1947
ISBN: 0140187383
Page Count: 132
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1947
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
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