Stark and harrowing, with a troubled protagonist’s inner turmoil magnified by a tangible evil.
In this debut thriller, a man’s decadelong registration as a sex offender sparks police interest following a 7-year-old girl’s murder in New Orleans.
Sean Andrew Jordan was only 18 when a dubious encounter with a younger girl led to a conviction of criminal sexual abuse. He’s a registered sex offender but has a family—a wife, Laurie, and 4-year-old daughter, Ren—as well as employment as an adjunct professor. When Lt. Detective Owen Dupree finds the body of little Mattie Daniels, he checks on sex offenders in the area. Dupree, however, quickly zeroes in on Sean, whose alibi—at home with Laurie—doesn’t hold up. Sean had kept mum about being at a bar with pal Douglas Wile, who served time for indecent exposure but plans to lie low and ignore the court order to register as a sex offender. Sean doesn’t have that option, especially after a radio station, to boost ratings, starts outing sex offenders. He loses his job and incurs the wrath of the occasional citizen. Dupree, meanwhile, connects recent murders with explosions that are occurring around the same time. He may have his eye on Sean, but so does a serial killer, and when a young girl goes missing, it’s not long before Sean vanishes, too. Hallenstein certainly doesn’t pull any punches with his dark, often bleak tale. The murderer’s deeds, for one, are brutal even in their aftermath, while insight into the initially unknown killer exposes a violent mentality. But the protagonist isn’t any less gloomy. Sean, for example, is convinced he killed his parents, who died in an explosion when he was 11—details that the story doesn’t clarify until near the end. Notwithstanding, he’s wholly sympathetic, his long-ago crime paling in comparison to the current predators’. Likewise, the system’s labeling and corresponding treatment of Sean torture him so much he begins to question himself: is he sexually attracted to underage girls? While the murderer’s reveal is not surprising, the later scenes brim with suspense, including men taking shots at Sean in the French Quarter, crowded with partiers ready for the upcoming Mardi Gras.
Stark and harrowing, with a troubled protagonist’s inner turmoil magnified by a tangible evil.Pub Date: April 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-692-57883-4
Page Count: 330
Publisher: Storyville Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
