An engaging thriller with heroic and villainous characters that readers will enjoy.
A U.S. Air Force officer teams up with a reporter to recover a missing missile before someone uses it to destroy the Hoover Dam in Getze’s (Big Shoes, 2015, etc.) thriller.
Lt. Col. Maggie Black is understandably worried when a B-52 drops off the radar at the Naval Air Facility in California. The test plane had been carrying experimental weaponry that her team had designed. Later, the search-and-rescue crew finds evidence of a crash, but the weapon itself, a missile, is nowhere to be found. Asdrubal Torres, of the Cahuilla Native American tribe, witnesses the crash and believes that it’s a sign from a kachina (or spirit). He surmises where the lost weapon must have landed, and he aims to retrieve it and use it to obliterate the Hoover Dam and thus refill Lake Cahuilla, which was once a boisterous body of water. Newspaper reporter Jordan Scott, who’s doing a story on the crash and the missing missile, gets in touch with Maggie. They discover a mutual attraction as well as a chance to help each other professionally, especially after the FBI boots Maggie from the official investigation. Meanwhile, Torres, along with his psychopathic techie crony, Henry Melancon, may prove to be dangerous with or without the weapon. Getze’s tale is populated by multifaceted characters with well-developed histories. Maggie, for instance, is a former Iraq War combat pilot with a $12,000 prosthetic hand, and at one point, Jordan returns a Cahuilla water basket to the tribe only to learn that his own great-grandfather allegedly killed the puul (or shaman) who made it a century ago. Torres is a sympathetic villain who feels guided by spirits, while his compatriot, Henry, often displays his “love of physical violence.” With so much back story, Getze wisely offers a relatively simple but no less exhilarating plot. The dialogue throughout is concise and includes sparky romantic banter between Jordan and Maggie: “ ‘you know how that is, Colonel Black, right?’ Jordan said. His voice had become huskier, the eyes somehow bluer. ‘When you want something bad?’…‘Bad-ly,’ Maggie said.”
An engaging thriller with heroic and villainous characters that readers will enjoy.Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-943402-69-4
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Down & Out Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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