A comically eccentric detective gets a terrific and fitting send-off.
In this fourth installment of a series, a private eye—out of commission for nearly a year—tries to regain lost memories and stumbles on a nefarious plot.
Sixty-year-old Max Bowman has no idea how he ended up in “the Community.” He knows he’s a former CIA operative, but the last few years of his life are a blank. After Howard, an old friend, visits, Max learns he’s in a Florida retirement home (of sorts) for agents who may know too much. He stops taking his medicine and makes a daring escape via motorized cart. But the life he’s slowly remembering has drastically changed in only 10 months. His girlfriend, Angela Davidson, has wed lobbyist Dudley “Duds” DeCosta. It’s not a happy marriage and Duds readily agrees to a divorce at Max’s request. The condition is that the private investigator must attend fundraisers for Sen. Eddie di Pineda’s reelection campaign. Max’s vouching for him will ease the senator’s ties to conspiracies swirling around the detective’s last few cases. At the same time, Max believes an enemy he thought he killed is still alive, at least according to cryptic, grammatically inaccurate texts he’s receiving. Soon, the PI and Angela’s son, Jeremy, called PMA (for Power, Mind, Action), find themselves in the middle of another conspiracy of worldwide proportions. As in earlier books, Canfield’s (Red Earth, 2017, etc.) latest entry—supposedly the final volume starring Max—boasts an often humorous tale and a progressively convoluted plot. Though initially the hero is simply piecing together returning memories, the story ultimately focuses on the mysterious yet clearly sinister scheme. But the best moments involve Max’s reunion with Angela and PMA. Max even acts like a nosy father to “the kid,” asking about his love life and offering his unsolicited opinion that PMA’s last boyfriend “wasn’t the right guy.” Max has been cynical throughout the series, but in this bracing and enjoyable tale, readers will surely sympathize with him as he hears what he’s missed (primarily in 2017). His reaction to Donald Trump as president and Coke Zero becoming Coke Zero Sugar is apropos: “What the hell had happened to the world in the past ten months?”
A comically eccentric detective gets a terrific and fitting send-off.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-9975707-3-1
Page Count: 376
Publisher: joined at the hip
Review Posted Online: Dec. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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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