Ice-T, rapper and one of the stars of Law and Order: SVU, tries his hand at crime fiction, with the help of co-writer Radcliff.
Marcus “Crush” Casey is paroled from Attica after serving 20 years on charges related to his leading the Vicetown Kings, a New York City gang. Gulliver Rono, his chief lieutenant, betrayed him to the authorities to take over leadership of the Kings. Now Crush wants revenge, but he’s been “schooled” in prison by the legendary “Mack D,” an autodidact intellectual. From Mack, he has soaked up the wisdom of nearly every deep thinker from Aristotle to Sun Tzu. Now Crush has contrived an elaborate plot to take vengeance on Rono and regain leadership of the Kings. Crush also wants to make the gang into something more than a rough bunch of dope “slangers.” Crush is intelligent and ruthless, but not a particularly likable protagonist, and the authors never make clear whether Crush intends to move the Kings into legitimate activities. Most of the action spins around the revenge quest against Rono and the co-opting of both the city’s prominent Hispanic gang, the Blood Devils, and its remorseless Asian gang, the Black Lotuses, a group involved in the sex-slave business. Crush may be down with supplying drugs, but he cannot stomach the brutal abuse of young girls. As Crush’s campaign moves toward its conclusion, readers learn there is more than one "playa" seeking his own brand of justice and more than one schemer pulling stings. While this vengeance tale is sometimes plagued by overly clichéd writing, the use of gangster slang lends an air of believability. It is, however, a relatively slow-moving crime caper, with much rationalization and philosophical musings apparently meant to add gravitas.
The open-ended conclusion suggests Crush may appear again. The snipers, flash grenades and car chases suggest Ice-T is readying a screen treatment.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-7653-2513-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2011
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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