Doubling the stakes of John Grisham’s The Client, Krist plunges a pair of young heroes into peril that starts with a bang and ends with a bang-bang-bang. Two bright, college-bound Washington, D.C., teenage friends, Jason Rourke (white) and Dennis Monroe (black), leave a dull birthday party to score some marijuana. They end up in a grimy Northeast neighborhood alley where their drug deal turns sour and the supposed dealer is injured. The next day they find out he’s an undercover cop and he’s dead. Before they know it, the boys have become targets of a vast political conspiracy. After they—re set up by a drug find in their high school lockers, each vamooses in a different direction. Krist (Bad Chemistry, 1997, etc.) works the parallel plot lines for nonstop action. Jason is involved in a grisly murder scene in the Rock Creek Park horse stables. Dennis is kidnapped and held —handcuffed and hungry— in a damp basement. But the boys have enlisted a respected white journalism teacher, Renee Daniels, who in turn seeks help from an ex-lover, black FBI agent Frank Laroux. Renee steals files and uncovers the conspiracy the boys have stumbled on. Soon —big men in trouble— are disappearing, replaced by the dead bodies of —little men on the margins.— Krist cuts back and forth between the dramatic, racially inflected perils of the boys and the emotional reactions of their distressed parents. Jason hides out with Renee’s mother on the Eastern Shore, setting the scene for a heart stopping chase scene in a moonlit swamp. Dennis’s rescue involves a bumpy dune-buggy race across a beach. And even though his nonstop activity would seem to forbid a break for anything deeper, Krist manages some observations on strained parent/child relationships, difficult friendships, political subterfuge, guilt, loyalty, and sins of the past. Most readers will remember this wild ride, though, as a page-turner with new dangers and set-pieces every two minutes.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-50080-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1999
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
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
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