A rigorously written and rousing murder mystery fueled by aggressive plotting and stocked with effervescent youth.
A teenager’s disappearance in an airport sets off a dramatic chain of events surrounding an escaped killer and some hard-won truths about love and possession—and how both can have disastrous consequences.
Forensic psychologist Kane (Legacy, 2016, etc.) parlays her knowledge of and experience with criminal behavior and trauma victims into this novel marking the first in the Doctors of Darkness series. The story features recent high school graduate Samantha “Sam” Bronwyn and her plucky best friend, Ginny Dalton, who travel to San Francisco for a post-school romp against her mother’s wishes. The girls’ dream escape vacation falls apart quickly when Ginny, wearing Sam’s basketball tournament jacket, seemingly vanishes from an airport bathroom without a trace, save for her cellphone. It displays a short message somehow involving Sam’s mother’s name, Clare. Befriending handsome fellow passenger Levi Beckett somehow softens Sam’s anxiety about her missing friend, though an escaped murderer from San Quentin named Cutthroat Cullen wanders the Bay Area undetected and frightens everyone citywide. Cryptic phone messages, a possible mistaken identity, and the determination that Sam was actually the abductor’s intended target are developmental plot points all smartly set against a moody, treacherous, foggy San Francisco backdrop. Adding romance to intrigue is Sam’s smoldering attraction to Levi and his “leather and soap”–scented swagger. As Cullen continues his murder spree across the city in the present day, Kane masterfully weaves in flashback chapters that fill in the killer’s homicidal history with a prison psychologist, who she really is, and how she became ensnared in his deadly head games. As both narratives run parallel to each other and the puzzle pieces begin to fall into place, the author tosses in a few surprises—just enough to keep readers on their toes and the guessing game between Sam and Levi tightly drawn. Because the book is fast-paced and gripping, careful attention is required to absorb the tale’s abundance of crucial details. Though the action is consistently busy, everything ends up gelling nicely in the compelling novel’s final third when the search for Ginny intensifies and the clock ticks down toward a final showdown. This feverishly drawn thriller places Kane’s clever control of crime fiction and knack for memorable characters on full display.
A rigorously written and rousing murder mystery fueled by aggressive plotting and stocked with effervescent youth.Pub Date: June 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-692-88096-8
Page Count: 358
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: July 31, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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