A diverting whodunit bolstered by a laudable, complex detective.
A California private eye puts himself and others in peril while digging into a triple-murder cold case in this first installment of a thriller series.
Chad Kidd, a former Palm Springs cop-turned-private investigator, looks into the murder of Chloe Nelson from four years ago. She was the teenage daughter of Kidd’s former colleague Phil Nelson, a retired lieutenant. Firefighters found the charred remains of Chloe; her mother (and Phil’s ex-wife), Diana; and Diana’s boyfriend, Dan Brady, at a house fire, though all three were dead from gunshots. But as Chloe’s burning body was in a wheelbarrow in the front yard, Kidd and Phil surmise the teen was the primary target. There’s a slew of people for Kidd to interrogate, from Lizzy Grant (the teen’s best friend who’s devoted a Facebook page to finding the killer) to Jay Strait (Chloe’s ex-boyfriend who Lizzy and Phil are convinced is guilty). Before long, an anonymous Facebook message and phone call threaten Lizzy to stay quiet, and Kidd notices a Dodge Charger following him around. While the PI updates his growing suspect list, he also notes a possible tie between drug dealers and the murder case. The increasingly dangerous investigation ultimately leads to further intimidation, more than one kidnapping, and, sadly, additional deaths. Perry (To the North, 2018, etc.) gets this swift mystery off to a running start, with Kidd already investigating and Phil providing case details. Readers only know as much as the detective, and identifying the culprit who committed the murders isn’t easy. Moreover, Kidd becomes a more complicated character as the story continues. He starts a dalliance with someone connected to the case and is flustered by the impending release of Goran Markovic, who had been awaiting trial for gunning down Kidd’s cop fiancee, Erin Jade. Though the mystery eventually unravels on its own, it’s still a treat to watch the sleuth in frequent scenes of interrogations. His easygoing demeanor tends to make others talkative, and he has a holstered Glock 17 in case the interviewee turns aggressive.
A diverting whodunit bolstered by a laudable, complex detective.Pub Date: April 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-09-336820-8
Page Count: 317
Publisher: Time Tunnel Media
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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