In 1934, a French police inspector tries to prove that an arrogant prosecutor wasn’t responsible for the murder of his young mistress.
The spirit of Georges Simenon is alive and well in this novel. Chief Inspector Arthur Gambrelli of the Metropolitan Police is sent from the city to the island of Q, where the murder of a young woman named Annette Cuomo has taken place. The obvious suspect is her lover, an arrogant senior prosecutor at the Justice Ministry, Jean Michel Bertrand, with whom Gambrelli has a combative relationship. Despite this, the detective doesn’t want to see the man railroaded, and he embarks on his own investigation. As he travels back and forth between the island and the city, Gambrelli’s list of suspects widens to include Bertrand’s wife, Adele, who knew that she was about to be thrown over for the younger woman; the victim’s sister, Lisa Cuomo, who goes missing and becomes the subject of an intense police manhunt; a drug smuggler who operates out of a fruit warehouse; and an array of other tough guys. Complicating the investigation is Gambrelli’s superior, Chief Superintendent Wilhelm, who tries to make his life a bureaucratic hell and is not above taking credit where it isn’t due. Although there’s nothing new in this murder mystery, the author nevertheless manages to make it a compelling story, mainly through the vivid cast of characters he assembles. Gambrelli is a wonderful personality, a civilized man doing an uncivilized job as best he can. His interactions with other characters are highly charged, especially with those who are less than forthcoming about their roles in the murder. The mystery itself is cleverly worked out, although there isn’t a lot of urgency in solving it. And rather unnecessarily, occasional newspaper clippings about the rise of fascism in Europe provide a context that is paradoxically missing from the story itself.
Gambrelli and his crew are such a delight that readers will hope the author is diligently at work on a sequel.
Pub Date: March 16, 2015
ISBN: 978-0990926603
Page Count: 326
Publisher: Chateau Noir Publishing, LLC
Review Posted Online: May 6, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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