A gripping, psychologically nuanced thriller set along the fault lines of a marriage.
A married couple covers up a murder, kicking off an engaging, literary suspense novel.
When Maggie kills an intruder in the home she shares with her husband, Chris, they face a seemingly untenable dilemma. It’s complicated by the fact that she publicly flirted with the murder victim before he began stalking her. Chris, irreparably scarred by events in his past, insists that they can’t trust the police and must conceal the body. But detectives zero in on them almost immediately, arriving at their home to question them the very next day. The ensuing investigation will test Maggie and Chris’ bonds of love and loyalty more than they could have ever imagined. How far will they go to protect each other when the police narrow their investigation further? Debut author Moretti’s prose is taut and elegant, with some passages that are positively lyrical (“[B]efore Maggie, his life had nothing….After, well, after was a love seismograph—sharp, ecstatic peaks and equally deep, despairing valleys, all intermingled with the apathetic flat line of the everyday”). The deft pacing allows time for plot complications to develop while also keeping readers turning pages. The author vividly portrays the sharp sting of infidelity, the abiding ache of infertility and the amorphous discontent of a love past its luster—all while moving the murder investigation swiftly forward. The foreshadowing is so skillful that plot twists feel surprising yet somehow inevitable. Other subtle touches (such as Maggie’s cracking the skull of the intruder with a Lenox vase, a wedding present) will further enhance readers’ pleasure. The dialogue is natural and authentic, and the story builds steadily to a satisfying, emotionally resonant conclusion.
A gripping, psychologically nuanced thriller set along the fault lines of a marriage.Pub Date: March 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-1940215266
Page Count: 306
Publisher: Red Adept Publishing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 4, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
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