An excellent, though disturbing, look at a woman’s desperate search for closure.
The second novel in the Doctors of Darkness series follows a psychologist and murderer 23 years after incidents that changed their lives forever.
On Friday, May 13, 1994, 13-year-old orphan Evie Allcott and her best (and only) friend Cassie, clutching their cherry Slurpees, accepted a ride from a stranger. Now, in 2017, Evie, a widowed 36-year-old psychologist for sex offenders, is still deeply affected by that night—even though she can’t fully recall it. She believes that Cassie was strangled by a man at “the hanging tree,” a disturbing landmark in their city of Oakland, California. In a desperate search for answers, Evie hitchhikes every other Friday, hoping for a dangerous situation to jog her memory. One night, someone does try to kill her, although it doesn’t make her remember the old crime; however, 41-year-old Butch Calder, who knew Evie in their youth, saves her. Back in 1994, Butch strangled his childhood crush after she rejected him, and he was only recently released from prison. The story alternates between the two main characters’ perspectives, jumping between 1994 and events in 2017, such as the addition of troubled Sebastian Delacourt to Evie’s therapy sessions. When another young girl is murdered at the hanging tree, detectives work to find the culprit, and Evie withholds some information from them. In the end, she grapples with a familiar question: “how do you destroy a devil without becoming one?” The story, by real-life psychologist Kane (Daddy Darkest, 2017, etc.), provides a captivating look into its characters’ complicated minds, and a psychological study of the effects of childhood distress: It’s revealed that Gwen’s wealthy father neglected her, which led to her kleptomaniac behavior, and Evie watched her mother die of a heroin overdose at the hands of a pimp, which may have led her to want to help people as an adult. The fast-paced story flows with precision, and Kane’s decision to reveal the crimes early on, before building up to the 1994 murder, generates genuine suspense. However, readers should be warned that this book deals with very sensitive subjects, including pedophilia and rape.
An excellent, though disturbing, look at a woman’s desperate search for closure.Pub Date: April 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-692-05359-1
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Time Tunnel Media
Review Posted Online: July 23, 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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