A lone sociopath seizes a school bus carrying 27 handicapped children, and the world's eyes focus on a small town in the California desert for an edgy 48 hours. When Las Cruces wakes up to the fact that a busload of its most vulnerable kids is missing, the authorities, frantically assembling their meager resources, call in the FBI. Sergeant Ellen Camacho (one of two detectives on the local police force) is put in charge of the case by Chief Paul Whitehorse (her lover as well as boss). In addition to sorting out jurisdictional conflicts with the feds and the sheriff's department, Ellen (a single mother who worked three years as a Los Angeles cop) must deal with distraught parents and a pack of ravening journalists. Meantime, she and her colleagues are frustrated by the lack of immediate demands from the perpetrator—which is precisely what the deranged kidnapper, Lowell Alexander DeVries, intends. An above-suspicion resident of Las Cruces, he exults in the chaos his careful planning has created. Although under the gun of a de facto deadline because of the captive children's medical needs, law-enforcement agencies can do precious little but dance to the kidnapper's tune. Finally, the murderous DeVries (a pedophile with a host of imagined scores to settle) submits his ransom requirements: a small fortune in one- carat diamonds and used bills. Matt LaSalle, the FBI's vaultingly ambitious man on the scene, arranges for the transfer of the cash and stones, which DeVries insists must be delivered by Ellen (whose daughter he's also abducted). The distraught but resourceful investigator sets out on the roundabout route DeVries has mapped. Under cover of darkness, she's able to upset his timetable and force a violent confrontation in the Mojave's desolate foothills. An absorbing suspenser from newcomer Fox that makes especially vivid use of setting and of its countdown format.
Pub Date: March 1, 1997
ISBN: 1-57566-139-X
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Kensington
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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