A thriller with an endlessly twisty plot and plenty of lingering questions for a third book to answer.
A California cold-case division finds that the disappearance of a B-movie director/producer isn’t nearly as straightforward as it initially seems in Booth’s (Olive Park, 2011) sequel.
Fresh off the closing of the infamous Olive Park murders, the three members of Sacramento’s On-Going Investigation Division are ready to move on. But their next case is a surprise, as it involves a recently missing person: James Marston Jr., who runs Molten Pitchers, a production company that specializes in low-budget horror films. IT expert Mallory Dimante, a fan of Marston’s schlock, hopes to be more than just an assistant to detectives Stan Wyld and Jake Steiner on this assignment. She and Jake head to Marston’s house and soon learn that the filmmaker was a bit of a recluse and may have been missing a week or more before anyone noticed. OID eventually finds Marston—or some of him, at least—but some body parts left in a BMW complicate matters, as they belong to someone else. Soon, a recently released ex-con seems a likely suspect. Meanwhile, private investigator Peter Berlin may have found a link between the producer and the previous Olive Park case. At the same time, siblings Michael and Jessie Cooper, two Olive Park survivors, are dodging Child Protective Services as their aunt recovers in the hospital. They’re unaware that a dangerous person is after them for a seemingly innocent item they’re carrying. The novel’s ties to the series’ first book are gleefully intricate, but they also mean that reading the prior installment is a requirement. There’s an abundance of shocking moments, including details surrounding Marston’s will, cryptic notes from PI Berlin, and a witness who saw someone near the producer’s car. The pieces of the puzzle don’t all come together by the end, leaving much of the story unexplained—hopefully to be resolved in the planned trilogy’s conclusion. But this one does reveal a villain or two and puts an OID member’s life on the line. It’s also fun to watch the imperiled Michael try to squeeze money from a production company that’s working on an Olive Park–related project.
A thriller with an endlessly twisty plot and plenty of lingering questions for a third book to answer.Pub Date: Aug. 10, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-9838329-2-8
Page Count: 386
Publisher: Dog Ear Publisher
Review Posted Online: Aug. 24, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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