A promising first adventure; if Heller can keep the quality this high, mystery fans will have a lot to look forward to.
A carefully plotted mystery, the first in a series featuring indefatigable Chicago columnist Deuce Mora.
The title refers to the case files Mora dips into when she doesn’t have an idea for a column, tips she’s gotten for semi-interesting stories to follow up on later. The lead she follows this time quickly turns deadly after an old man named Vinnie Colangelo agrees to meet at a bar but is tortured and murdered after she drops him off at his house. He seemed nervous and made reference to news in Las Vegas. The next day, Mora learns a senator has been assassinated in Las Vegas. Partially out of professional curiosity and partly out of a sense of responsibility to find who killed Vinnie, she starts on a trail that brings her into the cross hairs of organized crime and compels her to investigate an old friend. She ends up diving into local government corruption and a 57-year-old massacre at a migrant camp. Mora gets beat up, shot at, and intimidated along the way, but she’s tough, noirish, and Chicago through and through. She’s human though: she doubts herself, and not every lead means progress. Heller (Handyman, 1998), a former reporter who broke the Tuskegee syphilis story, skips no detail as she follows Mora’s thought processes and every conversation she has with a witness. Colorful characters surround her: Eric Ryland, her editor; Sully, her old flame; and a bevy of sources who range from helpful to hostile. Heller pulls off a neat stunt, tying together all the different crimes—Vinnie getting framed on a federal charge in the 1970s, the burning of the migrant camp in the ’50s, and the murder of the senator in the present—in a compelling package that actually adds up. Heller does tend to have Mora notice everything and linger on a historical detail or two about Chicago, which amount to short detours from the action. Yet it always ties back to Mora and the intriguing main plot. Heller should be able to get a lot of mileage out of such a great character and supporting cast.
A promising first adventure; if Heller can keep the quality this high, mystery fans will have a lot to look forward to.Pub Date: Dec. 8, 2014
ISBN: 978-1505880335
Page Count: 362
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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