A smart, steadfast gumshoe who, in her second book, continues to flourish.
An amateur sleuth initiates her own investigation when she believes the drowning of her sister’s childhood friend, a competitive swimmer, is anything but accidental in this thriller.
Fortyish Trisha Carson is working part time at a ballpark and living with her younger sister, Lena, near San Francisco. Trisha also helps out at a swim clinic led by her sister’s friend Shari Grantner, where Lena is an instructor. After hearing of Shari’s death by reputed drowning, Trisha suspects foul play, particularly once she learns the body shows signs of struggle. She’s confident enough to look into the possible murder herself; after all, she solved a swimming-related homicide just last year. This time, there’s a slew of potential killers: Shari’s little brother, Mitch, threatened her for keeping him from the family fortune, and her relationship with boyfriend Duncan had been dwindling. Clues, meanwhile, roll in, including a pile of X-rated photos and the mysterious man appearing in some. Things get dicier when a stranger accosts Trisha and warns her about her nosiness, followed soon thereafter by a second death—another apparent accident. Trisha is nonetheless determined to find a murderer and hopefully without injury to herself or someone she knows. Carroll’s (Dead in the Water, 2013) writing bounces off the page, as even non-swimmers will easily grasp the aquatic details (Each time Lena “flip turned at my end of the pool and streamlined off the wall, I could see her anxiety fade”). Trisha has a curious back story: Dad abandoned the family over two decades earlier and her husband voluntarily but inexplicably disappeared. Her equally unusual investigative method involves making a copy of Shari’s apartment key and snatching a few of the dead woman’s (pertinent) things. But while the suspect list and distrust among characters run entertainingly high, the plot is occasionally muddled. An individual’s arrest, for example, doesn’t entail a murder charge, which Trisha contradicts later, and the narrative ends with a still unclear motive for a killing.
A smart, steadfast gumshoe who, in her second book, continues to flourish.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9991109-0-4
Page Count: 340
Publisher: Beachbreak Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 13, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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