No surprises, but provides some excellent evidence for anyone who wants to argue that Spenser’s creator has been writing...
Freelance gunslingers Virgil Cole and Everett Hitch (Resolution, 2008, etc.) ride into yet another town and treat it to another baptism of fire.
Though he hasn’t seen Allie French for a year, Virgil has never given up hope of finding her again. Riding south with sidekick and amanuensis Everett, he catches up with her in Placido, Texas. Virgil and Everett spirit her off in jig time, but the magic doesn’t return so easily. Everett can spot the problem with Virgil right off: “With Allie he was different. I didn’t like different.” Clearly it’ll take something special to rekindle the flame—something like the job Virgil and Everett are offered as deputy sheriffs in nearby Brimstone, “an actual town” that’s more than just a collection of gamblers, drunks and whores. Val Verde County sheriff Dave Morrissey is concerned by the growing tension between Pike, a gang leader who’s opened a perfectly law-abiding saloon, and Brother Percival, a firebrand revivalist determined to close down every watering hole in Brimstone. With each saloon Brother Percival shutters, his mission sets him more clearly on a collision course with Pike. The episodic plot prescribes some preliminary skirmishes: the kidnapping of a slain rancher’s wife and daughter by a Comanche brave with a grudge against Pike; their rescue by Virgil and Everett and a half-breed tracker they’ve hooked up with; and their traumatic difficulties readjusting to life in Brimstone. But there’s never any doubt that all this is heading to a climactic showdown between Pike and Brother Percival, followed by a post-climactic showdown between Virgil and his friends and the sole survivor, according to the iron rule that governed Virgil’s first two adventures: “Let the vermin fight to the death and then pick off the winner.”
No surprises, but provides some excellent evidence for anyone who wants to argue that Spenser’s creator has been writing nothing but westerns for 35 years.Pub Date: May 5, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-399-15571-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2009
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
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
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