A tale of an amateur detective who’s bright and riveting even when he makes mistakes.
A teenager with aspirations to be a police officer looks into the case of a missing woman in the latest, prequel installment of Greyson’s (Pure of Heart, 2015, etc.) thriller series.
Foster brothers Jack Stratton and Chandler Carter each have three months before they enlist in the Army, and they intend to follow their two years of service with stints in college and the Police Academy. Jack wants to enjoy his last summer, but financial analyst Stacy Shaw’s unexplained disappearance changes his plan. He doesn’t know her, but he does know “J-Dog,” aka Jay Martin, whom cops arrested after he admitted to finding the woman’s wallet. Although Jack and Jay, foster kids who grew up together, aren’t currently on friendly terms, their former foster mother, Aunt Haddie, enlists Jack’s help. He compiles a wide range of suspects, from a crazy, homeless man known as Vlad to Stacy’s lascivious boss, Leland Chambers. Fortunately, Chandler willingly sits with Jack during his stakeouts. Decidedly less fortunate is Detective Lyle Vargas, who believes that Jack is impeding a police investigation and threatens Jack’s future career by casually accusing him of crimes such as planting evidence. Jack will have to steer clear of the detective to solve the case, unless he’s prepared to wind up in prison with J-Dog. Despite the protagonist’s age, Greyson’s story isn’t in the young-adult genre. Jack is actually at the tail end of his teens, and this book chronologically takes place before a series featuring Jack as an adult detective. Greyson adeptly establishes Jack’s personal life while also reminding readers of the mystery; Jack’s date with a delightful young woman named Kelly, for example, begins with a news report about Stacy and later leads to the couple witnessing Jay’s arrest. The sound mystery brims with red herrings, and quite a few of Jack’s hunches miss the mark even though he bases his guesses on evidence. The book also shows Jack pragmatically investigating by perusing Facebook pages and doing old-fashioned footwork. The narrative explores darker territory—including drugs, prostitution, and possible murder—but doesn’t fully immerse itself in it, and there’s hardly any vulgar language aside from perhaps too many utterances of the word “crap.”
A tale of an amateur detective who’s bright and riveting even when he makes mistakes.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-68399-002-4
Page Count: -
Publisher: Greyson Media Associates
Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 2016
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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