An intriguing debut thriller from a burgeoning talent to watch.
A clever debut novel in which an engineer inadvertently helps his best friend solve an intricate FBI case.
Gardner’s thriller centers on two childhood buddies: computer engineer Barry Thomas and FBI Agent Val Scoffer. Barry just started a new job in Cleveland, where he makes fast friends at work and at his apartment complex. But, through no fault of his own, Barry just as quickly makes an enemy. A woman has been leaving increasingly angry notes to someone named Jimmy on Barry’s door. He tracks her down and tells her he doesn’t know any Jimmy. So she begins stalking him instead, both in person and on social media. In addition, he begins getting progressively sicker, and he’s afraid the woman, who works at a pharmaceutical company, has poisoned him. He becomes paranoid of everyone around him: “The police were allowing the person who had done this poisoning to slip through their fingers. The icing on the cake was his concerned neighbors turning up, obviously to assuage any suspicion and try to minimize their own involvement.” Val, based in Kansas City, is having his own problems. There is a rat within his department, and a racketeering case falls into chaos when all the electronic evidence disappears. In addition, one confidential informant is killed and another, named Jimmy, vanishes. Val suspects that a suddenly flush colleague is the rat, but he doesn’t have a plan to trap her until Barry tells him of his woes. Gardner, who spent decades in IT, uses his background to create a believable crime scenario, but he doesn’t overwhelm the reader with technical details. Gardner’s narrative is crisply paced, alternating between Barry and Val, with few quiet scenes. His conversational writing style makes for a quick, breezy read. Sympathetic characters in Barry and Val, an arrogant but realistic villain, and a large supporting cast add to the fun. It almost seems like he’s planning a series featuring all these characters, which would be welcome. He’s done some admirable groundwork in this first volume.
An intriguing debut thriller from a burgeoning talent to watch.Pub Date: June 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5446-3743-3
Page Count: 292
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: July 21, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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