Bloated but bouncy, bound for big sales.
DeMille’s biggest yet deserves high points for entertainment and readability, though nothing of his has been as moving or richly written as 1990’s The Gold Coast.
Up Country is a sequel to The General’s Daughter (1992), filmed with John Travolta as DeMille’s Army homicide detective Paul Brenner. Despite DeMille liking the film, it stuck closely to his plot and was a gloomy dud. Though lighter in tone, Up Country also turns on a bloody central event and an imponderable moral problem: Brenner’s old boss Colonel K. Karl Hellman, head of the Criminal Investigation Division, calls the retired Chief Warrant Officer Brenner back in for a special op. Brenner’s sent back to Vietnam, where he did two tours during the war (as did Lt. Nelson DeMille), to look into a murder that took place 30 years ago. A Vietnamese soldier wrote a letter to his brother, later recovered by the CID, that told of an American captain shooting a fellow lieutenant in the Treasury Building within the Citadel in Quan Tri City, then looting the treasury’s safe. This monster later ran a black market that rewarded him with big money. Colonel Hellman actually knows who this captain is, but wants Brenner to investigate cold and see what he can find out as hard evidence for a military trial. Brenner lands in Saigon and falls in with Susan Weber, a businesswoman who sticks to him throughout his investigation and is, of course, far more deadly than she seems. This gives DeMille a chance to warm up his earlier fancy sophisticated dialogue between Brenner and CID rape investigator Cynthia Sunhill from The General’s Daughter, although Susan, while mysterious, sexy and dangerous, turns out to be a less ingenious foil than Cynthia throughout several hundred pages of two-person dialogue that only too often rehashes what we already know. The climax lands Brenner in the same hot water that got him retired/fired.
Bloated but bouncy, bound for big sales.Pub Date: Jan. 29, 2002
ISBN: 0-446-54657-0
Page Count: 700
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2001
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
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
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