A playful, well-researched thriller that remains romantically genuine throughout.
This third volume of a series finds a family of lawmen—and a veterinarian—trying to thwart a scheme to manipulate the populace with microchips.
Megan Chauner is a veterinarian in the Portland, Oregon, area. When she receives a strange package from her best friend, investigative reporter Jackie Milburn, she follows its instructions. Megan pulls up stakes and rents a remote cabin, hoping to keep the package—containing evidence of unethical work performed by CSV Pharmaceuticals—secure. The company's research revolves around quantum tunneling and carbon nano tubes as drug delivery systems. When Megan learns that Jackie has been killed, she fears that she’s next. Heavy footsteps arrive outside the cabin, and she and Leyna, a white shepherd dog, stand ready. But the grizzly sized man who’s arrived is none other than Detective Lucas McAllister, part-time resident of the cabin. Still wounded from the gang-related ambush that killed his partner, Lucas is easily tranquilized and trussed up by Megan. After a cooling-off period, he decides to help her investigate the sinister plans of CSV and the company ClickChip, which makes implantable chips that can dissolve inside a living organism, leaving no trace of the owner’s manipulation. But Lucas has lost one partner in the line of duty. Does he dare place another in jeopardy? Though the sex jokes fly with campy abandon, Garrett (Bound by Shadows, 2017, etc.) ensures that the hero’s emotional healing remains the backbone of the narrative. In the first half, readers will likely titter at the verbal foreplay between Megan and Lucas, as when she says, “Make it quick, since that’s probably your trademark.” Despite an instant physical attraction, their romance develops organically. Later the McAllister clan appears, including Caden, Ethan, and Billy, as well as Lexi Donovan, the hacker from Digital Velocity (2017). Garrett keeps the science components accessible, as in the line “The chip is a polymer that dissolves when the temperature drops, as in when the animal dies.” Those unfamiliar with the McAllisters should enjoy this installment, though a full series read will deliver the maximum emotional impact.
A playful, well-researched thriller that remains romantically genuine throughout.Pub Date: March 26, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9989265-3-7
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Garrett Publishing
Review Posted Online: April 26, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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