An intoxicating start to a tale about facing down the ghosts of the past.
An emotionally haunted detective and a laboratory-made vampire struggle with their unnatural attraction in the first book in Bellon’s (Embracing You, Embracing Me, 2012, etc.) new Rogue Saga.
Shyla Ericson, a Los Angeles police detective, has not had an easy life. After killing her sexually abusive father when she was just a teenager, and losing her mother to suicide a few years later, she left her hometown of Redding, Calif., and started over in Los Angeles. Since then, she’s buried herself in her work, and has kept her co-workers at arm’s length. She also uses alcohol to keep the nightmares of her past at bay. But when her captain offers her the biggest case of her career, she can’t say no; it’s her chance to go undercover and to take down Victor Champlain, an up-and-coming drug lord. The problem is that Champlain operates out of Redding, so Ericson will have to return to the town that haunts her dreams. Meanwhile, Champlain has acquired a new bodyguard named Brennan Miles, who’s spent the last 10 years as a prisoner in a laboratory, getting genetic modifications that have given him strength, speed and a craving for blood. Those attributes prove useful to Champlain, who purchased Miles’ loyalty by breaking him out. But as the undercover Ericson spends time with Miles, he begins to rediscover his humanity, and she also feels an attraction that she can’t explain. As the case builds and Champlain gets suspicious, Miles and Ericson must confront their loyalties, their pasts and their feelings for each other. Meanwhile, Ericson also becomes emotionally invested in the fate of a young girl from a broken family. Overall, the story’s pace is steady, but not particularly fast. However, award-winning author Bellon puts a lot of humanity into her emotionally charged thriller, fleshing out her intriguing story with living, breathing characters. She engagingly explores how Miles can’t escape from what he has become, for example, and how Ericson decides what route she wants her life to take as she struggles to close the case. By the end, readers will be eagerly awaiting the next installment in the saga.
An intoxicating start to a tale about facing down the ghosts of the past.Pub Date: March 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-0991213122
Page Count: 452
Publisher: Pandamoon Publishing
Review Posted Online: April 9, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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