A promising but unevenly executed thriller.
In Sweetapple’s (Key West Revenge, 2012) thriller, a group of friends on a hunting trip discover that they’re the ones being targeted.
In 1985 Japan, U.S. Army Capt. Jim “Vette Head” Stillwater and his team are on an intelligence mission, pursuing members of a terrorist group in an effort to deter a possible attack on U.S. assets. Although they’re not fully convinced that there’s any real threat, they follow their orders to eliminate the terrorists. However, they learn later that their orders were based on a secret revenge plan and are told that if they ever set foot in Japan again, they’ll be arrested for murder. Disgusted, Jim resigns and joins the private sector. Fast-forward to 2005: Jim now works for a defense contractor and tries to convince his friend LP Thomas to join him on a New Hampshire hunting trip with some of his Army buddies. It turns out that LP, a fellow car fanatic, needs to pick up a transmission for his Corvette, and it happens to be on the way. However, the transmission is buried in the backyard of LP’s eccentric acquaintance. When the group instead unearths a cache of Nazi gold, all hell breaks loose. This thriller’s rambling and somewhat confusing storyline is full of action, but it’s a bit of a hodgepodge; halfway through the book, it’s still not clear whether the story is headed into spy-novel or military-thriller territory. Many of the characters are one-dimensional, and some verge on caricature, such as a cocaine-snorting biker and an overweight, lazy cop with a penchant for white supremacy. The overall premise has potential, and readers interested in the military will find that the author knows his stuff. However, some aspects of the novel are overexplained, such as the characters’ intricate knowledge of weapons and muscle cars, and these extraneous details detract from the novel’s action-packed climax.
A promising but unevenly executed thriller.Pub Date: June 23, 2005
ISBN: 978-0595672509
Page Count: 178
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: March 13, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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