Mild-mannered supercontractor John Deal tackles a crazed cyberevangelist and his murderous minions—in the least finely nuanced, and most conventional, of Standiford's five thrillers (Deal to Die For, 1995, etc.). There can't be much worse than having a superconglomerate ``media sales center'' move into the same Coral Gables neighborhood as your mom-and-pop bookstore, threatening to undersell you, offer a more diverse stock, and drive you out of business so that it can jack up prices and cut back services- -unless of course it's getting murdered by a pair of comic-book killers just as you've come up with something that might have stopped the Mega-Media project from ever getting off the drawing board. Of course, Deal doesn't know why his old friend Arch Dolan, mainstay of Dolan's House of Books, was killed and his inoffensive Uncle Els left in a coma—but we do, and that's just the trouble. In the opening chapter, even before Arch Dolan is cooling on the mortuary slab, Standiford fingers the Rev. James Ray Willis, megalomaniacal messiah of the Worldwide Church of Light, who's convinced that the way to escape the international conspiracy of one-world, liberal-humanist thought control is to get there first with the most. In the Rev.'s case, that means a close bonding with Mega-Media and sending in the shock troops- -Dexter and Iris Kittle, a graying pair of killers from Omaha- -when negotiations stall. It's fun watching these saintly assassins dispatch Willis's more venal obstacles, but the fun is strictly one-dimensional, as is the reunion of Deal and his estranged wife Janice (paging Geena Davis) to overcome the emotional wounds in their marriage and inflict some serious wounds of the pleasanter kind back in the Nebraska tundra. A mega-villain bent on world domination, a pair of grotesque husband-and-wife hitfolk, a damsel in heavy-breathing distress, a pure avenger and his lady, a blizzardy finale. And you thought James Bond was passÇ. ($30,000 ad/promo; author tour)
Pub Date: Feb. 19, 1997
ISBN: 0-06-017620-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
