More than a straight-up police procedural, this tale gives readers the excitement of the chase while taking them deep into...
The adventures of Detective Jack Bailey continue as he and his partner run down clues in pursuit of a serial killer on the loose in Chicago in this sequel.
As in the first installment of the Bailey series, the past is always looming in this tale. The police detective’s PTSD both colors his interpretation of events and is affected by them. The trail begins when Sister Anne Celeste, a beloved elderly nun, is found strangled in her room with no sign of forced entry or struggle. Bailey and his young, college-educated partner, Karl “Sherk” Sherkenbach, complement each other, focusing on different clues and approaching witnesses in their own ways. But all the while, they are tossing jokes over each other’s heads, with Sherk favoring literary references and Bailey, old cultural allusions (“We’re about at Abbott’s place. Wonder if Costello’s there”). Since the nun served during the tenure of a priest accused of child molestation, they wonder if there is a connection. Their suspicions are confirmed when the second and third victims are suspected pedophiles. But the plot does not run in a straight line. There are many twists, some quite significant, as well as numerous subplots dealing with Bailey’s and Sherk’s personal lives, their ambivalence about hunting someone ridding the world of pedophiles, their attitudes toward the job, and even their finances. In many ways, Bailey is your typical fictional police detective. He lives alone; remains cynical and irritable; thrives on junk food; drinks too much; and answers to the requisite pain-in-the-neck boss. But Lelvis (Bailey’s Law, 2016) skillfully fleshes out what could have been a mere stereotype into a vibrant, living, breathing human being. She does this subtly with all her characters, assembling them brick by brick while simultaneously building plot tension through hints and innuendoes that are slowly revealed naturally as the story unfolds. Even the killer is no one-dimensional bogeyman but an empathetic individual developed through chapters devoted to him.
More than a straight-up police procedural, this tale gives readers the excitement of the chase while taking them deep into the psyches of its diverse characters.Pub Date: April 19, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-68433-009-6
Page Count: 244
Publisher: Black Rose Writing
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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