Readers of this middle installment in Swierczynski's Charlie Hardie trilogy (Fun & Games, 2011) who suspend disbelief...
A rugged ex-cop faces his greatest challenge ever as a tortured inmate.
College student Julie Lippman decides to take action when her boyfriend Bobby dies in a Nevada plane crash during semester break. The trouble is, Bobby wasn't supposed to be on that plane but rather building houses for the poor. Julie enlists a few friends to help dig up Bobby's grave, but some mysterious figures kill them all. Seventeen years later, one-time top cop Charlie Hardie is haunted by the death of his partner Nate. Hardie's been hired to protect troubled Hollywood actress Lane Madden, targeted by Mann, an infamous hit woman. Wounded in a shootout, he's whisked away by EMTs. Over the next several weeks, Hardie, drifting in and out of consciousness, loses strength and the use of one leg. When he wakes up fully, he's a prisoner, at first overseen by Mann and then thrown into a bizarre prison, where he's told he's the new warden. The prisoners are shackled, and the guards are violent and terrified of a disembodied voice called the Prisonmaster, who sees all. Meanwhile, in the outside world, Hardie's FBI pal Deke Clark begins to look for him but stops abruptly when a Big Brother–like figure contacts him with a video monitoring every move of him and his family. It looks as if Hardie must escape on his own.
Readers of this middle installment in Swierczynski's Charlie Hardie trilogy (Fun & Games, 2011) who suspend disbelief will be rewarded with nail-biting suspense, ample twists and a crackling narrative style.Pub Date: Oct. 31, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-316-13329-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Mulholland Books/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2011
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
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