Olivia sums up the richly readable appeal: “Sinning. In such a magical, wholesome place. Good stuff.”
Asher’s (It’s a Calamity, Jane, 2015, etc.) signature character, “bad-ass grafter gal” Olivia, resurfaces in theme-park mecca Orlando, Florida, this time to recruit a former mark for help in conning a millionaire.
Jack Maxwell, a former “big-time hustler…and part-time scammer,” is currently the discontented manager of a faux Irish bar. Years before, he introduced Olivia to the life, but she ended up scamming him for about $15,000 before she disappeared. Now, she’s back with Jillian, an enigmatic and mostly silent partner, and needs a couple more players for a plan that involves “High yield, low risk. No cops. Some millionaire….Twenty percent each.” The millionaire: Jerry Mallore. The pitch: a real estate deal. To reveal more would be criminal, but Asher deftly moves “from the basic to the complex” without the reader feeling cheated when the final twists unfurl. As the con goes down, time shifts wring maximum payoff from scenes that alternate between planning, execution, and the inevitable best-laid-plans fiasco. Asher’s spare writing has real flair, as in a confrontation with unforeseen rival scammers: “Grant took a step toward them, trying to intimidate. But that wouldn’t work. Olivia and Jillian both stood confident. Easy to do, Olivia feeling her Glock 39 resting against her back, stuck into the waist of her dress skirt.” Asher is a gripping storyteller; what he leaves to the imagination (in one tense episode, for instance, a “scuffle” among the principals) is as compelling as the con’s shifting and uncertain alliances. Dialogue has real snap, too, as when Olivia first sees Jack in his themed-bar costume. “My, oh my, look at you. You’ve gone and gotten yourself all Irish.” Readers don’t need to be familiar with the characters’ previous exploits—Olivia Jane Doe (2013) and Damage Day, Fla (2014)—to be thoroughly entertained by this new caper. But newcomers who, like Jack, love “watching Olivia do her thing” will surely want to go back and catch up on what they missed.
Olivia sums up the richly readable appeal: “Sinning. In such a magical, wholesome place. Good stuff.”Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-145754-067-7
Page Count: -
Publisher: Dog Ear
Review Posted Online: Sept. 17, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
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