In Bartley’s (Unto the Daughters of Men, 2014, etc.) sixth historical noir, bank robber Ross Duncan tries to find a killer in Kansas City, Missouri, amid the fraying underworld peace.
In 1934, in an idyllic farmhouse outside of Kansas City, Duncan and friends discuss the finer points of guns, eat a home-cooked meal made by one man’s wife and then execute a gangster tied up under a tree. Skilled in guns and robbery, they may be hard men, but Duncan and company—including his partners Gordon and Gnennett, late of the Polish military—are in town to solve the murder of an old friend. Unfortunately, though Boss Tom Pendergast may still be nominally in charge of Kansas City, with the recent Kansas City Massacre and the assassination of Pendergast’s underworld lieutenant John Lazia, Kansas City has been thrown into disarray. So when Duncan agrees to help a mysterious Valencian singer named Rachel Hernando with her gangster problems and is suddenly getting shot at on the street, it’s unclear who is gunning for Duncan and why. Bartley confidently continues the Duncan series with classic noir touches—as with Bogart’s turn as Marlowe, Duncan seems to get a lot of information from helpful women—and a poetically crisp delivery: When Rachel demurs from Duncan’s compliment of “tough” by saying that she just hides it well, Duncan notes, “That’s what being tough means.” While Bartley writes an entertaining mystery-thriller, there’s also an interesting underlying theme about the loyalty of men: Pendergast’s world is falling apart because it lacks the loyalty that Duncan and his friends have for each other—the loyalty that drives Duncan to seek his own brand of justice. In order to make this historical world—especially the criminal landscape—clear to the reader, Duncan sometimes delivers informative asides on, for instance, the Kansas City Massacre or the Jacobean revival house they’re holed up in; while these asides are fluidly and usually clearly written, readers may wonder at the breadth of Duncan’s information.
Another strong book about Duncan’s attempts to do the right thing in an uncertain world.
Pub Date: May 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-1780362366
Page Count: 298
Publisher: Peach Publishing
Review Posted Online: June 23, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2014
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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