A rookie Secret Service agent's troubles are only beginning when a scheming senator gets killed on her watch—in this fleet political thriller from Shelby, the Los Angeles-based author of This Far From Paradise (1988). Even if she'd followed the safety precautions she let Senator Charles Westbourne fatally tone down, Holland Tylo, left fatherless herself by an assassination 15 years ago, would have been no match for the hired killer who calls himself Preacher—a man with no nerves, years of experience, the best connections in the business, and a real fondness for his work. The true test of Holland's mettle comes after she's shuffled onto enforced leave and realizes she's carrying something—a diskette full of damning testimony against all the best senators—that Westbourne's killer missed. Everybody wants the diskette, and Preacher, coolly eager to kill Holland and grab the goods, will have to queue up with Holland's boss, Secret Service deputy director Arliss Johnson; her lover, Service agent Frank Suress; and madly ambitious Senator James Croft, determined to buy his way into the Cardinals, Westbourne's senatorial cabal, with the diskette's dirty linen—or use it to vault over the Cardinals into the White House. From here on in, you could probably write the story yourself: Holland goes on the run, calls people who assure her they can bring her in safely, gets betrayed, and goes on the run again, as Preacher, carefully established as a sexual sadist in addition to his other habits, strides a step behind her, repeatedly just missing her while winnowing the field of the less fortunate. But you could never write it as rapidly and efficiently as Shelby, whose narrative instincts, honed presumably by big-ticket movies, carry even the most preposterous counterplots into a current so dizzying that you'll probably finish the book in less time than it would take to see the movie. An even slicker version of The Pelican Brief, with the Senate sitting in for the Supreme Court. Paging Julia Roberts. (First printing of 250,000; film rights to Tri-Star)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-684-80177-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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