No surprise ending, alas, but from beginning to end, an effective page-turner with a realistic, if somewhat cynical, climax...
When San Francisco D.A. Prentice Marshall “Skipper” Gates III, of all people, is charged with the death of a male teenage prostitute, the city braces for the first trial of the century, and attorney Mike Daley (Special Circumstances, 2000) scrambles to build a case.
Daley, narrator and protagonist, has some interesting entanglements of his own: his partner in Fernandez and Daley is ex-wife Rosie, and the only other lawyer in the firm is an ex-girlfriend who, like Daley, once worked for Gates’s law firm. Gates, who was in the middle of a campaign for California attorney general when the trouble started, is far from the ideal client: he’s insufferable, and his lack of candor continually hampers Daley’s efforts. His lawyer-daughter, Ann, is worse, however, as she tries time and again to insinuate herself onto the defense team. As the investigation broadens, it takes Daley around San Francisco—the Mission District, North Beach, Pacific Heights—where he deals with an interesting cross-section of locals, nearly all of whom hold him in high esteem. These include sleazy political consultants, a top-of-the-line private investigator, and a priest who has to go into the gutter to save his parishioners. A great deal of the story takes place in the courtroom, with the trial unfolding from Daley’s perspective. Here, the author, as expected, does a good job of getting into the mind of his character. The trial procedure is fascinating and more believable than most, as Siegel concentrates on legal strategies instead of lawyer’s egos.
No surprise ending, alas, but from beginning to end, an effective page-turner with a realistic, if somewhat cynical, climax that holds true to the powerhouse milieu in which Daley and his colleagues have been operating all along.Pub Date: July 31, 2001
ISBN: 0-553-80144-9
Page Count: 387
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2001
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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