An engagingly written series starter with a bounty of plot twists and Miami vices.
An attorney links a present-day betrayal and murder in Florida to unsolved past crimes in Gordon’s debut legal thriller.
Miami lawyer Vance Courage still thinks about a decades-old cold case of a murdered waitress at the Hotel Mutiny from when he was a cop. The Mutiny catered to drug kingpins who demanded expensive champagne, girls, and more. His friend Daniel Ruiz, a retired police sergeant, hasn’t forgotten the crime either. In the present day, Vance is dating “tall, whippet-thin blonde” Lauren Gold, whom he met on a dating website. However, Lauren, a freelance video marketing producer, is catfishing Vance at the request of Ray Dinero, her friend and singular client, who has a connection to the drug gangs. Meanwhile, Vance’s uncle Tony Famosa slithers back into his nephew’s life after hiding in Cuba for 20 years. The FBI long has had Tony on its most-wanted list for smuggling billions of dollars’ worth of cocaine into Florida—and much of the money is still missing. It turns out that Tony may be connected to Ray, and he’s also linked to a Cuban sociopath, Ramon “Mongo” Solana, who was at the Mutiny on the fateful night that the waitress died—as was Lauren. Coincidences start piling up, and Vance and Daniel may finally get to the bottom of that unsolved crime. Readers may be intrigued by the fact that this story was inspired by events at the real-life Hotel Mutiny in Miami, where the author worked in the late 1970s and early ’80s. Rich descriptions fill the pages of this novel; for example, Daniel’s face features “fleshy folds between his eyes, deep enough to clamp a dime.” Some of Gordon’s word choices are particularly evocative, as when a killer with a deformed foot “crabbed out of the room.” The characters are distinctive, and protagonist Vance is shown to have considerable flaws. It should be noted, however, that there are violent scenes of murder and sexual predation that may be over-the-top for some readers.
An engagingly written series starter with a bounty of plot twists and Miami vices.Pub Date: Jan. 15, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-73360-641-7
Page Count: 358
Publisher: Gordon Productions, LLC
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2019
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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