Exquisite in its gloom; should earn even more Ross Duncan fans.
Ross Duncan searches 1934 Chicago for the ever-elusive Irishman in a tale of vengeance (Sleep Not, My Child, 2013, etc.), the third novel in Bartley’s hard-boiled thriller series.
When former bank robber Duncan can’t find the Irishman, the man responsible for a loved one’s death, he does the next best thing: kills the Irishman’s brother and steals his girlfriend, Evelyn. The Irishman’s retaliation catches others in the crossfire. A Chicago criminal organization grants Duncan permission to hunt down the Irish gangster, provided that Duncan works with a killer-for-hire who’s rarely sober. The historical thriller showcases recognizable faces for readers keeping up with the series. Each character struggles with dramatic entanglements; in addition to the Irishman and Evelyn, there’s Duncan’s friend and bank-robbing associate, Jimmy, whose wife is dying; and special agent Trestleman, with whom Duncan shares a tenuous alliance. This installment, however, is more despondent: more violence, more dead bodies and a much more pessimistic Duncan, who’s fixated solely on his vendetta. It’s missing much of the tenderness of the previous entry, in which Duncan was resolute in his pursuit of an abducted boy. But it does show progression for both the hero and story: It’s hard to ignore the image of a .45 resting atop Duncan’s Bible, two items he always carries to signify his acceptance of the violent path. By this time, touches of noir are expected and the crisp dialogue doesn’t disappoint, such as Duncan’s rather blunt appreciation of beauty: “My eyes were filled with what they saw.” And Evelyn may very well be Bartley’s first genuine femme fatale, as the hero is torn between petty resentment over a pornographic photo featuring Evelyn (because of a man whose face can’t be seen) and his complete lack of trust in her. He’s at least smart enough to brace himself when she leads him into an unfamiliar room.
Exquisite in its gloom; should earn even more Ross Duncan fans.Pub Date: May 1, 2013
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 344
Publisher: Peach Publishing
Review Posted Online: Nov. 1, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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