An uneven but often enjoyable thriller with a magnetic lead.
A serial killer specifically targets an FBI agent in this debut crime novel.
Special Agent Nadine Munroe is single by choice, despite all the attention she receives from members of the opposite sex. The reason is because, in her view, it’s hard to find an African-American man who can handle a successful, independent African-American woman. One night, she becomes the target of a very different sort of attention. A text from an unknown number tells her to turn on the TV news, which reports that police have found a woman’s disfigured body on the banks of the Hoover Reservoir in Ohio. The person who sent the text claims responsibility for the murder, calling himself “Osiris,” the “Lord of the Perfect Black,” and identifying Nadine as his “Isis”: “you have blossomed into a radiant Nubian Goddess,” he writes. “The lamb that was sacrificed tonight couldn’t hold a candle to your beauty.” Nadine quickly becomes involved in the Columbus police department’s investigation. She becomes particularly alarmed when she learns that the dead woman was a member of the Kappa Beta Zeta sorority, whose alumni include her friend Leslie Hill—who’s just woken up, kidnapped and imprisoned in complete darkness. Green writes in a colorful, aggressive prose style that mimics the attitudes of his law enforcement characters: “It was a tear fest at the Kappa House.” Overall, though, the quality of the prose is patchy, and some of the character interactions have a somewhat stagy quality. However, there’s also a sense of gallows humor throughout that keeps things moving along. Nadine is an easy heroine to root for, and readers will find Osiris, despite his comic-book-villain motivations, to be inherently intriguing, due in part to his mysterious method of disfiguring his victims. Although Green mostly hews to familiar genre tropes, he ultimately delivers an entertaining reading experience.
An uneven but often enjoyable thriller with a magnetic lead.Pub Date: July 25, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-692-91292-8
Page Count: 268
Publisher: Franklinton Press
Review Posted Online: June 19, 2018
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
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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