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
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
