After writing five mystery thrillers as Keith Peterson (The Scarred Man, 1989), Klavan at last puts his real name on one-and no wonder: this take of a psychiatrist trying to save his kidnapped daughter is a virtuoso display of Chinese puzzle-box plotting and slick emotionality, worthy of Hitchcock at his best. ``The right apartment was tough to find, so they murdered the old lady,''-sociopath Sport and his monster-sized retarded sidekick Maxwell, that is, setting up in this opening sentence their rental of the suddenly vacant apartment across the yard from the one owned by mild-mannered shrink Nathan Conrad, wife Agatha, and five-year-old daughter Jessica. The Conrads become aware of Sport and Maxwell when they awake one day to find their apartment broken into, Jessica snatched, and Sport on the phone. The ransom? Nathan must visit Elizabeth Burrows, the paranoid angel-faced murderess he's treating at the request of fellow shrink Jerry Sachs, and ask her, ``What is the number?'' and ``don't say a word'' to the cops, warns Sport, whose surveillance of the Conrads through binoculars convinces the couple that they're being watched by hidden cameras and microphones-a lie that cuffs Agatha as she tries to call for help from a neighbor and a plumber: Or is one of these men Sport in disguise? Meanwhile, Nathan dashes to the asylum, confronts Sachs, and visits fragile Elizabeth, discovering, as twist follows twist, that her paranoia is based on a hideous reality. Breaking her out, Nathan races with Elizabeth to a rendezvous with Sport (be at the clocktower by 9:00 p.m. or Jessica dies) as she reveals ``the number''-key to a fateful secret. But even after Nathan settles with Sport, can he-as asked in an extended and astonishingly cathartic climax-find Jessica in time to keep monstrous Maxwell from tearing the little girl apart limb by limb? Not profound, and blatant in its emotional manipulations, but peopled with rich characters and intensely gripping and suspenseful: one of the most entertaining psychothrillers in many months.
Pub Date: May 7, 1991
ISBN: 0-671-74008-3
Page Count: -
Publisher: Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1991
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
An unusual and mesmerizing novel, gracefully written and deeply disturbing.
In her first novel to be published in English, South Korean writer Han divides a story about strange obsessions and metamorphosis into three parts, each with a distinct voice.
Yeong-hye and her husband drift through calm, unexceptional lives devoid of passion or anything that might disrupt their domestic routine until the day that Yeong-hye takes every piece of meat from the refrigerator, throws it away, and announces that she's become a vegetarian. Her decision is sudden and rigid, inexplicable to her family and a society where unconventional choices elicit distaste and concern that borders on fear. Yeong-hye tries to explain that she had a dream, a horrifying nightmare of bloody, intimate violence, and that's why she won't eat meat, but her husband and family remain perplexed and disturbed. As Yeong-hye sinks further into both nightmares and the conviction that she must transform herself into a different kind of being, her condition alters the lives of three members of her family—her husband, brother-in-law, and sister—forcing them to confront unsettling desires and the alarming possibility that even with the closest familiarity, people remain strangers. Each of these relatives claims a section of the novel, and each section is strikingly written, equally absorbing whether lush or emotionally bleak. The book insists on a reader’s attention, with an almost hypnotically serene atmosphere interrupted by surreal images and frighteningly recognizable moments of ordinary despair. Han writes convincingly of the disruptive power of longing and the choice to either embrace or deny it, using details that are nearly fantastical in their strangeness to cut to the heart of the very human experience of discovering that one is no longer content with life as it is.
An unusual and mesmerizing novel, gracefully written and deeply disturbing.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-553-44818-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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