An enjoyable diversion with a little something extra for political junkies and followers of the Supreme Court.
In this mystery, a Supreme Court justice suddenly dies days before the court is expected to rule on a Florida presidential election recount.
Melissa “Mel” McGinty of the Supreme Court Police Force is making her nighttime rounds when she discovers the body of Justice Oliver Wendell Oglethorpe on the floor of the court’s gym. She calls her boss, Lt. Frank Fort, who arrives with two FBI agents. Mel is told to stay out of the investigation; instead, she calls a meeting of the Amazon Detective Agency, an eclectic group of women who possess an assortment of skills from computer hacking to fortunetelling. She also consults her “sometimes live-in boyfriend,” Mike Mahoney, a recently retired Arlington, Virginia, police officer. Oglethorpe, one of two African-American judges on the court, was appointed by current President Richard Fett, which gave Fett an all-important fifth conservative vote on the bench. But after the death of Oglethorpe’s wife, the justice seemed to experience a political change of heart on many matters. One of them may have been the decision on the Florida recount. And there are other groups whose causes could be served by Oglethorpe’s death, as well as an anonymous white supremacist making noise online. There are plenty of potential suspects for readers to consider in Oster’s (The Hacker Chronicles, 2017, etc.) breezy, often humorous mystery. Narrator Mel, who was raised by a detective dad and schooled by old private-eye flicks, is a smart and delightfully persistent gumshoe who has the potential to effectively carry her own series. Oster makes effective use of his many years of experience as a journalist, which included a decade covering the Supreme Court for venues such as the National Law Journal, for which he was editor-in-chief, and Bloomberg News. His occasional, knowledgeable forays into serious issues before the bench (including oil pipelines, abortion, and gun control, among others) add heft to what’s otherwise a relatively light detective novel. The story’s final twist is most satisfying.
An enjoyable diversion with a little something extra for political junkies and followers of the Supreme Court.Pub Date: April 17, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9916437-6-9
Page Count: 337
Publisher: Padraig Press
Review Posted Online: March 17, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 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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