Confident, readable and pleasingly busy entertainment, flavored with a dash of disenchantment.
In war-scarred London as the Allies prepare to invade Europe, an intrepid American female investigator tackles low crime in high places.
Mrazek (Unholy Fire, 2003, etc.) tells a dark, meaty story, ripely cast with members of the U.S. top brass and the British upper crust. The novel floats, and occasionally flounders, on an ocean of detail evoking the sights, smells and mood of an exhausted nation during a grinding war. His improbable protagonist, 25-year-old Jewish forensic genius Liza Marantz, is not only gorgeous but heroic too, having survived a torpedoing in the Atlantic en route to England. Seconded to Major Sam Taggart, a maverick ex-cop now in military security, her job is to safeguard the Allies’ two big secrets: the cracking of the ULTRA code and the launch details of Operation Overlord. When two female colleagues die in suspicious circumstances, Liza and Sam begin to unravel a plot involving bluebloods and senior American officers, in particular General Kilgore, who supplies steaks, whisky and women to the high command. When their investigations penetrate too close to home, the general has Sam removed from the case. Liza goes dancing at the Savoy with scarred Battle of Britain hero Lord Nicholas Ainsley, who invites her to a lavish weekend party at his country estate, Rawcliff. Fellow weekenders include Liza’s code-cracking pal, Charlie Wainwright, and his menacing Irish friend, Des Sullivan; another murder brings Sam dashing to Rawcliff, too. Ainsley, forced to turn traitor because he is bankrupt, and Des, a Nazi spy, kidnap Charlie, intending to fly him to Europe and extract his secrets. Events move at a satisfying clip toward a grand finale that again dunks our heroine into the sea, clinging to an aircraft fuselage along with Charlie and a villain with a prosthetic leg and a romantic soul.
Confident, readable and pleasingly busy entertainment, flavored with a dash of disenchantment.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2006
ISBN: 0-670-03478-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2006
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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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BOOK REVIEW
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