A gripping and intelligently executed political drama.
In this debut thriller, a college professor stumbles on a plot to rig an American presidential election.
The presidential contest in 2016 is vertiginously close, and Diane Redmond becomes the first female occupant of the Oval Office, narrowly winning by four electoral votes. Matthew Yamashita is a political science graduate student in Seattle conducting a national demographic survey of all the Electoral College voters, the subject of his dissertation under his adviser, professor Duncan Calder. Matthew begins to discover some statistical anomalies: there’s an unusually high number of electors turning up dead during the election, all of them Democrats, all of them in states dominated by Democratic voters and without laws constraining faithless electors. He decides to call an old classmate who became a journalist about his findings; the reporter suspiciously turns up dead immediately after. Matthew then sends his research to Calder, but the grad student also dies, in a hit-and-run incident while riding his bicycle. Calder, initially skeptical about Matthew’s conspiratorial conclusions, becomes frightened after someone vandalizes his office and attempts to break into his home. He calls a former graduate student, Imogen Trager, an FBI agent already investigating voting irregularities in Illinois. Trager arranges for Calder to meet James Novaczeck, Redmond’s campaign manager, but he’s assassinated before the meeting takes place, making the professor seem like a prime suspect. Unsure how far the conspiracy has spread, Trager and Calder find themselves on the run, trying to solve the case and save their lives. In his novel, the first installment of a series, McCrone renders the unlikely in tantalizingly plausible strokes. The plot pulses ahead rapidly, and its dramatic march finds a climactic conclusion in under 200 pages. In addition, the author affectingly depicts the blooming romance between Trager and Calder, both lonely, frustrated souls who have too often sought solace in their careers. (At one point, the professor recalls: “Imogen’s voice often drifted to him, like a half-remembered scent on the air. The coolness of that voice, its dusky lilt haunted him.”) The entire book hinges on an explanation of the byzantine Electoral College, something McCrone manages to supply in mercifully clear prose that never devolves into dry, textbook-style exposition.
A gripping and intelligently executed political drama.Pub Date: March 23, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-692-79783-9
Page Count: 216
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 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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