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
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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