A tightly written and thoroughly engaging crime tale.
This sixth installment of a series features the ongoing adventures of a British cop.
For the past three years, Yorkshire-born expatriate Cole Thornton has run a bookshop in the sleepy surfer town of Shelter Cove, California. If the store is notable for anything, it’s for being one of the few businesses not yet bought by local land developer Arlo Rankoff. One day, a car crashes through the window of the shop, destroying Cole’s inventory and nearly killing motel owner and auxiliary police deputy Holly West, who came in to flirt with the Englishman. When Cole gets up and looks into the cab of the vehicle, all that’s left of the driver is his foot on the gas pedal. Soon Ben Gardner, Shelter Cove’s chief of police, arrives. He turns out to be angrier at Cole than at the surf bum he assumes to have driven the car. Gardner feels protective of Holly, the survivor of an abusive marriage, and he senses there’s something fishy going on with Cole. Gardner looks into the missing driver, who soon turns up dead. But Cole has bigger troubles to deal with: He hears that his violent, estranged younger brother, British cop Jim Grant, has been looking for him to settle some old business. First Cole’s ex–sister-in-law drops by to warn him, and then the dangerous man himself appears—out to bring his older brother to justice. Campbell (Beacon Hill, 2017, etc.) writes in a gracefully muscular prose enlivened by drolly cinematic dialogue: “ ‘I keep forgetting this is a litigious society. Poodle power.’ ‘You mean the woman dried her dog in the microwave?’ Cole raised his eyebrows. ‘What was General Electric thinking? Not putting that in the instructions.’ ‘I think it was a Samsung.’ ” The author excels at hiding the ball while still keeping readers invested in the story. It takes a while for Grant to show up, let alone for the main thrust of the plot to be revealed, but such inventive narrative strategies help Campbell keep his series fresh as it moves into its latest volume.
A tightly written and thoroughly engaging crime tale.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4834-8806-6
Page Count: 284
Publisher: Lulu Publishing Services
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 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
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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