A topical, tropical mystery replete with scenes of entertaining buddy comedy.
Two police detectives return in a drag-inspired whodunit set in Florida.
Charmingly mismatched sleuths Nick Scott and Norm Malone embark on a new adventure in this sequel, this time in sultry Key West, home to “chickens everywhere you walk, people greeting strangers as if they were good friends, and no one seeming to have a care in the world.” Nick, host of the eponymous TV chat show The Gay Detective, met the slouchy, heterosexual Norm in the previous installment of the series, in which they teamed up to catch the notorious killer The Reaper while becoming good friends and roommates. Now, as a thank-you gift from the Chicago Police Department, they’re vacationing together in Key West. Of particular interest to Nick is an annual New Year’s Eve performance by the local drag diva Sho Yu, set to descend upon her adoring fans in a giant red shoe to formally announce her engagement to strapping fiance Matt. To the shock of onlookers, the shoe catches fire on the way down, injuring Matt, and within moments Sho Yu turns up missing. Officer Raphael Perez recruits Nick and Norm to lend their talents to the investigation, one that becomes even darker when Police Commissioner Tom Moss is found dead in his office. The two detectives begin to piece together what increasingly looks like a series of connected killings by a sinister and enigmatic network. Stripper Merlot and a bevy of sassy drag queens (Mimi Peters, Sin Onhym, and Polly Saturates) turn up to crack some jokes and complicate the plot. Along the way, Nick and Norm each finds romance, discovering once again that “sex is the best drug out there and doesn’t require a script” and encountering a number of unforeseen hurdles. In this enjoyable caper, Michaels (The Gay Detective, 2015) displays a superb sense of humor, and he deploys it more successfully here than in his last book, using it to balance Nick’s complex emotions and the story’s suspense. Nick’s fraught hookups are effectively woven into the texture of the plot (“Raphael certainly knew how to push my buttons and that scared me. We hardly knew each other”). But his reaction to Norm’s own liaison—particularly the intensity of his anger—may strike some readers as more convenient to the narrative than psychologically realistic. But this is a quibble: Michaels’ beguiling new tale is an amusing and gripping way to spend a few hours.
A topical, tropical mystery replete with scenes of entertaining buddy comedy.Pub Date: May 8, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9983242-0-3
Page Count: 242
Publisher: La Mancha Press
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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