A routine assignment to trace the path of some illicit Angolan diamonds leads a freelance adventurer to the obligatory fate-of-nations scenario. The De Beers cartel, to its own mind, doesn't have enough diamonds. Ever since the Angolan government made it legal for the natives to sell the stones they've been hoarding, they haven't made their way into the De Beers's clutches, but are being traded to somebody else—a sinister new player, as diamond digger Ross Janson tells troubleshooter Mark Rayner, who's buying up the stones to trade for illegal ivory. The player is Maximilian Kabinda, of Kinshasa Copper; and if Rayner needs any proof of how dangerous he is, he gets it when, minutes after his talk with Janson, he watches from a distant ditch as Kabinda's men execute the Angolan officers who've come to arrest them for ivory trafficking—and then, for good measure, sees Kabinda shoot Janson and an animal-rights activist who's on the scene. Shocked and harrowed by the memory of the carnage he's witnessed, Rayner retreats to a sisterly sweetheart on Cape Cod, but Kabinda's arm is longer than expected. Two contract thugs come looking for the photos Rayner snapped from his ditch, and in order to protect his long-range health, the hunted man takes cover under the umbrella of WOPES, the World Organisation for the Protection of Endangered Species. It's a decision that'll lead him to a mind-bogglingly complex smuggling plot, a British intelligence officer's scheme to give the UK an edge in the negotiations over the transfer of Hong Kong to China, and some magical nights with a woman whose image has troubled his dreams ever since that horrifying day in Angola. Middling actioner with pro forma betrayals. Rayner takes the whole thing personally, but nobody familiar with Peel's long record (Dark Armada, 1995, etc.) should make the same mistake.
Pub Date: March 11, 1997
ISBN: 0-312-15065-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1997
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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