Tautly gripping, with vividly malevolent characters and some excellent historical color.
A Civil War whodunit by former US congressman and second-novelist Mrazek (Stonewall’s Gold, 1999) describes a combat veteran’s 1863 quest for a prostitute’s murderer.
John “Kit” McKittredge is a Harvard senior when the Civil War breaks out, and he enlists with patriotic fervor. Commissioned as a lieutenant, Kit sees action early, leading a platoon at Ball’s Bluff. Wounded in the stomach, Kit is soused with laudanum by doctors who (lacking antibiotics) fully expect him to die within days. Incredibly, he survives, though not without gaining a solid addiction. In recognition of his valor, the army offers him a noncombatant post, assigning him to the Provost Marshall’s office, responsible for investigating crimes and corruption. There’s plenty of both, for the unprecedented war budget has brought every species of swindler, embezzler, and common thief to Washington, D.C., along with more whores than Baptists and a government staffed by cutthroat opportunists who could make Machiavelli blush. On his first assignment, investigating war profiteers who supplied defective artillery to the army, Kit is bluntly warned (first by a mysterious stranger, then by a congressman) not to dig too deep if he knows what’s good for him. Undeterred, he presses on but is soon diverted by the murder of an unknown woman last seen publicly at the birthday party of the notoriously debauched General Hooker (his name already synonymous with prostitution). As Kit looks into case, he finds that the victim (a prostitute named Anya Hagel) had a number of unsettling connections to some very prominent members of the government. He also finds that General Hooker has taken an interest in Kit’s career, inviting him to join his staff and introducing him to prominent military and political figures. If this is the carrot, what is the stick? Well, there’s the inconvenient matter of Kit’s opium addiction—and his bad luck in falling in love with Amelie, a prostitute who used to work with Anya.
Tautly gripping, with vividly malevolent characters and some excellent historical color.Pub Date: April 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-312-30673-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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