An inventive tale by a first-time author who’s off to a fast start.
A blend of sci-fi and courtroom drama that takes readers into a brave new world of criminal investigation.
In New York state, the Osiris team, headed by prosecutor Freddy Logan, has racked up an impressive track record of convictions due to their access to a secret source of information. Logan prosecutes financial malfeasance as treason, and death sentences await those who are convicted. However, the Osiris team seeks a sentence of “death and seven,” which means that the bodies don’t have to be released for seven years, giving federal investigators plenty of time to “sift and grind through” seized materials “with unremitting precision.” The corpses are sent off to a hidden lab called Glimmer Development, where researchers Kenneth Conklin and Gregory Ellerby, in exchange for funding, use technology they’ve developed to extract damning evidence from their brains, which they forward to Osiris for future prosecutions. This unethical arrangement might have continued successfully for years, but then Amanda Wilson, an assistant at Glimmer, feels guilty about how one of the “patients” is treated and sends a letter to the dead woman’s lawyer. Then Kenny, jealous about Gregory and Amanda’s relationship, decides to become a whistle-blower; the problem is that he mistakenly approaches technology thieves instead of reporters. Debut author Welch does a thorough job of examining what can happen when science outpaces regulation, posing the age-old science-fiction question: Just because something can be done, should it? However, readers may find it hard to feel much sympathy for the victims in Welch’s scenario, who are consistently portrayed as the greedy few seeking to profit off of the honest many. The author conjures a realistic cast of characters, including scientists and lawyers who are more concerned with results than consequences as well as a handful of relative innocents caught in the middle. Cynicism, rather than morality, triumphs in the end; in a world of advancing technology, the dead can’t even take their secrets to the grave.
An inventive tale by a first-time author who’s off to a fast start.Pub Date: July 28, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9990205-8-6
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Immortal Works Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 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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