A riveting crime tale with a surprisingly effective multigenre approach.
A mobster has little time to find a kidnapped girl, thwart child sex traffickers, and prove himself innocent of murder in this sequel.
When someone abducts the granddaughter of Shinzo Tanaka, the Tanaka syndicate leader seeks help from Levi Yoder. A fixer for the Mafia’s Bianchi family in New York, Levi doesn’t initially know why Tanaka chose him to track down 5-year-old June. She’s the daughter of Tanaka’s dead son, Jun, and lives with her mom, Helen, in Maryland. The search for June is barely under way when feds pick up Levi and accuse him of murdering three FBI agents. They have no real evidence, but Levi agrees to be a cooperating witness and assist in finding the true killer. Meanwhile, June’s kidnapper demands $10 million within two weeks or Helen will never see her daughter again. Complicating matters is Levi’s personal mission to get abused immigrant children off the streets, provide them shelter, and help them secure U.S. citizenship. This ultimately results in threats from human traffickers in Flushing, Queens. But it also leads to a covert organization that wants to recruit Levi in taking down child sex traffickers, whose upcoming illicit deal will be taking place in mere weeks. Rothman (Darwin’s Cipher, 2019, etc.) deftly blends a few genres in this second installment of a series featuring Levi. The murders and abduction, for example, are shrouded in mystery while combating human traffickers generates ample action. Levi’s genius pal, Denny, shows off gadgets à la the James Bond films, with the narrative even comparing him to Q. The author deftly retains a coherent narrative by typically concentrating on one subplot at a time, like the one monopolizing the final act after another is all but resolved. With his mob ties, Levi is a flawed but likable protagonist. He’s involved in sometimes disturbingly violent deeds, but his desire to rescue children is noble. He’s also persistently cool; when an associate says Levi can’t save all the kids, he confidently responds: “I can try.”
A riveting crime tale with a surprisingly effective multigenre approach.Pub Date: March 31, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-09-227955-0
Page Count: 374
Publisher: Time Tunnel Media
Review Posted Online: June 14, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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