Lister (Blood Work, 2017, etc.) packs this fast-paced thriller with plenty of social commentary and tops it off with a...
A Florida expert at clearing cold cases meets his match.
John Jordan is both a prison chaplain and an investigator for the Gulf County Sheriff’s Department. Reporter/blogger Merrick McKnight, the partner of John’s boss, Sheriff Reggie Summers, wants John to help him and another friend, Daniel, a retired professor of religion, solve a tough case. Merrick and Daniel have been recording a true-crime podcast on the disappearance of 21-year-old Randa Raffield in 2005. Randa was a student at the University of West Florida, a beauty and champion swimmer whose car was found hundreds of miles away from the Pensacola rally she was supposed to be attending. She’d been in a minor accident, but truck driver Roger Lamont, who arrived on the scene moments later, testified that she seemed fine and did not want him to call the police. Worried about her safety, he called anyway, and when the police arrived less than seven minutes later, Randa had vanished and has remained unseen despite a massive search. Agreeing to help, John listens to all the podcast episodes he’s missed to bring him up to speed. Merrick and Daniel had managed to get interviews with most of the people in Randa’s life: her father, her most recent boyfriend, some college friends, and true-crime blogger and podcaster Nancy Drury, who the men invite to add a female viewpoint. Theories abound concerning the young woman who’d graduated from childhood abuse by her aunt’s boyfriend to drug and alcohol use and plenty of sex: Randa was suicidal; she was picked up and killed by a stranger or someone she knew; she ran off to a new life. Despite threats from someone claiming to be the killer to everyone involved in trying to solve the case, John becomes obsessed with finding the truth, something the self-proclaimed killer tells him will never happen.
Lister (Blood Work, 2017, etc.) packs this fast-paced thriller with plenty of social commentary and tops it off with a lollapalooza of an ending.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-888146-71-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Pulpwood Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 18, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2017
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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