A con brio account of a real-life Double Indemnity murder: a philandering, debtdriven insurance man has his beautiful wife executed for the promise of a cool million and a half in insurance money. On September 7, 1984, Rob and Maria Marshall, an attractive, seemingly happy couple from the shopping-mall-bland "urb" of Toms River, N.J., were driving home from a visit to Atlantic City when Rob swerved the car into a dark picnic area—allegedly to check a soft tire. Minutes later, beautiful Maria was shot dead on the front seat. Rob told local cops that he heard a car pull in behind them, and that he was knocked unconscious and robbed as he knelt by the rear tire. The cops didn't buy it; and even Chris, oldest of Rob's three teen-age sons, instantly suspected his dad. Rob considered himself a pillar of Toms River society, but that cold, consumption-mad society soon spurned him. After all, it turned out that Rob had been planning to dump his wonderfill wife for local sex-bomb Felice; that he was massively in debt; and that he had insured his wife's life for one-and-a-half million. Detectives tracked down New Orleans lowlife Ferlin L'Heureux, who testified that Rob paid him to kill his wife—a task actually accomplished by another mean old southern boy. Kevin Kelly, the tough, idealistic prosecutor, concentrated on nailing Rob. During the trial, as one self-serving lie followed another, Rob stopped being a real human being even to his sons—he became just a bagful of brand-names, soulless and brittle. Found guilty, he now spends his time on New Jersey's Death Row. In a switch from the assiduous, morally ambivalent Fatal Vision (1987), McGinniss here offers a streamlined cautionary tale—airing out his contempt for Toms River's slavish materialism and portraying Rob Marshall not as a monstrous exception but merely as an extreme manifestation of that avarice. A lively true-crimer, then, with a touch of moral fire—and another likely hit for McGinniss.
Pub Date: Jan. 17, 1988
ISBN: 0517061643
Page Count: -
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1988
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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