Just the thing for readers who think there’s nothing worse than trying to sell your house in the suburbs.
Veteran suspense-monger Saul (Midnight Voices, 2002, etc.) manages to mess up the foolproof story of a family whose teenaged daughter is kidnapped.
The strain of Steve Marshall’s backbreaking commute to his law firm means that his family’s got to pull up stakes from Camden Green, on Long Island’s North Shore. But although his wife Kara gamely makes the rounds of Manhattan brownstones, their daughter Lindsay refuses to accept the inevitable. She’s been waiting to hear if she’ll be named head cheerleader for her senior year, and she’s not about to leave her squad, her friends and the only world she knows. Although Saul spends forever maundering over the Marshalls’ squabbles, they’re small potatoes compared to the main course. A madman who’s already sneaked into Patrick Shields’s house, burned it down and left his wife and two daughters dead now has his eye on Lindsay. Taking advantage of that most innocuous of all social occasions, the realtor-sponsored open house, he strolls into the Marshalls’ home not once but twice, first to snoop around and take a souvenir, then to snatch Lindsay. Numb Steve alternates between despair and denial (he’s soon back at work), and Kara works feverishly to mobilize the neighborhood. But stolid Sgt. Andrew Grant is convinced that unhappy Lindsay’s simply run away. Wrong. She’s shackled in the basement dungeon of the man the press will soon be calling “Open House Ozzie,” and she’s not the only one. Fortunately for readers with weak hearts, her captor is so literal-minded in his psychosis that the longer he toys with his captives, the less menacing he becomes. There’ll be more violence, more toothless threats (“Drink, or you might die too soon”) and of course more casualties, but nothing involving anybody you care about.
Just the thing for readers who think there’s nothing worse than trying to sell your house in the suburbs.Pub Date: Aug. 23, 2005
ISBN: 0-345-46731-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2005
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
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
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