Pell writes with a sure, confident hand, the flame of the first page making it almost till the end.
Murder, blackmail and corporate greed give a newly promoted Scotland Yard chief inspector a run for his money in his first case in this investigative thriller where inaction is sometimes the best action.
Simon Craig had a good thing going as a marketing chief for an English steel manufacturer, but he wanted more. A “womanizing rogue,” Craig was a member of a shadowy cabal known as “the club,” a group of executives that illegally set steel prices among European Union steelmakers. He blackmails his former associates and, as insurance, entrusts a package of damning evidence with ex-flame and solicitor Susan Robson. To cover their tracks, the club torches Robson’s office and kills off Craig in the prologue. Craig, a serviceable McGuffin, is presented several times through flashbacks that show his flawed, preening personality but do little to further the plot; he’s best left dead and buried. Long-suffering widow Rachel lets Scotland Yard know Craig’s employers were sniffing around for paperwork—just the clue Randall needs to begin piecing the conspiracy together. Craig’s evidence survives, and Robson, along with another of his lovers, secretly plans to use it to punish the corporate criminals. As time runs out for Randall’s investigation, Craig’s death becomes moot as all involved sense there are bigger fish to fry; unfortunately, few of them make it to the pan. In a picturesque and well-described Europe, what ensues is a mad dash as club minions maneuver to keep their money and their employers safe and out of jail while Robson marshals her team amid mounting deaths. The prose is all business with few flashes of insight or wit, but it moves the story and characters along with economy and hardly any wasted words. Before a relatively lackluster denouement, the inventive plot and characters will keep readers focused and guessing at what intrigues are to come.
Pell writes with a sure, confident hand, the flame of the first page making it almost till the end.Pub Date: July 29, 2014
ISBN: 978-1496983060
Page Count: 238
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: Sept. 17, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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