A tense, perceptive tale of an investigation into a terrifying threat.
In Rubin’s (Eating Bull, 2015, etc.) thriller, a medical student’s friends and acquaintances become mysteriously, deathly ill—possibly due to a curse.
American Ben Oris and his Haitian best friend, Laurette, have a great time during a trip to Paris, aside from their excursion into the catacombs. There, 18th-century human bones seem to call to a dazed Ben, so he touches a femur that cuts his hand. Two weeks later, he returns to his internal-medicine clerkship in Philadelphia, despite the fact that his hand isn’t fully healed; meanwhile, Laurette has bloody visions of Ben hurting others. Then Ben’s landlady’s daughter, Kate, with whom he’s had an occasional romantic fling, shows up at the hospital with an assortment of odd symptoms. Soon, other people are sick, as well, and all have links to Ben. Laurette surmises that the illnesses are because of a curse that’s connected to the catacombs bone, and she recommends that Ben get help from some of her family members, who practice Vodou. He’s skeptical of this idea, but then Laurette’s visions correctly predict the arrival of a baby—Ben’s newborn son from a one-night stand. With no medical solution in sight, Ben realizes that he has to embrace unusual methods in order to save others, including his son, from potential danger. Rubin’s novel is a solid medical thriller with a touch of the supernatural. Her sharp prose is rife with medical jargon, but it’s always comprehensible; it’s perfectly clear, for example, that a high eosinophil (white blood cell) count is a bad thing and indicative of sickness. Ben is an appealing protagonist, but the myriad secondary characters shine too, including Laurette; Willy, Ben’s dad; and hard-edged attending physician Taka Smith, who becomes more sympathetic as the story goes on. The explanation of the curse reveals a fairly simple origin, but it’s one that allows a potent final act and a ceremony that could entail a good deal of bloodletting. The story also treats the Vodou religion respectfully; as Laurette says, it’s “not the Hollywood version of voodoo dolls and zombies.”
A tense, perceptive tale of an investigation into a terrifying threat.Pub Date: March 27, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-940419-97-8
Page Count: -
Publisher: ScienceThrillers Media
Review Posted Online: May 11, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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