An absorbing tale with a capable and complex detective.
In Reede’s (Blinked, 2017, etc.) thriller, a Texan private investigator makes headway in her search for her missing sister, who vanished three years ago.
Lana Madison has never stopped looking for her identical twin, Dania, even if the police evidently have. The 23-year-old has such a strong spiritual connection to her sibling that she’s certain that Dania is still alive. After dropping out of college, Lana consulted private investigator Ben Collins, who later hired and trained her. She’s skilled in self-defense tactics, which come in handy when two men abduct her; fortunately, it turns out that the perpetrators may be connected to Dania’s disappearance. Lana investigates them with help from “The Boys”—her computer-savvy pals Kit and James—as well as EJ, who was Dania’s prom date back in high school. One of the traffickers possesses bondage-torture videos, and although the images are blurry, Lana and EJ suspect that Dania is the victim pictured in the footage. Lana also works with fellow private eye Oscar “Oz” Cooke, whose teenage stepdaughter, Cassie, disappeared around the same time as Dania did. Meanwhile, a creepy, unknown stalker is watching Lana as her determination to find her sis puts her, and possibly her friends, in further peril. Reede’s flawed but resolute private eye is an exceptional protagonist. “I’m nobody’s punching bag,” she says—a statement that applies both to social settings and physical confrontations. At the same time, the author shows Lana to be emotionally conflicted, particularly when it comes to romance; she resists her attraction to multiple men (including EJ; Oz; her friend/personal trainer, Favor; and local police detective Samuel Norris), resulting in occasionally awkward—and funny—situations. Scenes from the unnerving stalker’s perspective offer memorable moments, and Lana’s investigation progresses at a steady pace throughout. The plot relies too heavily on coincidence at times, but the extraordinary ending is one that readers won’t easily forget.
An absorbing tale with a capable and complex detective.Pub Date: Dec. 15, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-64437-023-0
Page Count: 269
Publisher: Black Opal Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 29, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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