Richard’s inclination to favor the one-percenters’ perspectives may leave readers craving more of the wicked socialite...
An Everyman detective is asked to solve a murder in a wealthy community in which ample motives and abundant resources make everyone a suspect.
Caroline Campbell wishes to celebrate her husband’s 65th birthday in the low-key manner dictated by her breeding. Ostentatious announcements are for other people. So Caro invites several of her and John E.’s closest friends for a weekend at their rural Pennsylvania getaway, Bucolia Farm. As author Richard (Naughty Nana, 2013) shows the guests receiving the engraved invitations, each of the eponymous one-percenters gives clues about what readers may grow to revile about them: greed, pretension, lust. When the guests are assembled, it appears that most are united in their dislike of one of their own. Preston Phillips, who’s earned his invitation as the hostess’s first cousin, is as much a draw to partygoers as he is a repellant. Some have come to Bucolia just to settle a score with Preston. Marshall and Julia Winthrop have been on the wrong side of Preston’s shady business dealings. Vicki and Leon Spiller seem to blame Preston for the death of their teenage son many years ago. For other attendees, feelings about Preston are more mixed. His former fiancee, Margo, whom he left at the altar years ago, finds herself almost willing to make amends. When Preston doesn’t make it through the celebration weekend alive, Detective Oliver Parrott, who takes charge of the case, is so struck by the partygoers’ consensual impressions of the selfish businessman that he realizes the case may be more about who didn’t kill Preston than who did.
Richard’s inclination to favor the one-percenters’ perspectives may leave readers craving more of the wicked socialite skewing that’s employed only intermittently in her adult mystery debut.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-62694-771-9
Page Count: 360
Publisher: Black Opal
Review Posted Online: Dec. 12, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2017
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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