Picking the wrong photo from an escort service's book sends Philadelphia ad exec Ruth Lasseter careening into a nightmare of murder and obsession. Ruth's just looking for somebody presentable to bring to an office party that her lover and his suspicious wife will be attending. But she gets more, much more, after her subsequent one-night stand with good-looking Tim Hagan. Tim is evidently so besotted with Ruth that he won't let her break it offand if she could look into his past, she'd see how badly he handles rejection. In what seems like the crest of her terror, quietly demented Tim kidnaps her from her office; but although she's rescued by security guard Aidan Kincannon, her nightmare only deepens. A year later, even after the police have called her and Aidan to identify Tim's body (fat lot they know), she's still convinced he's out there watching herand of course she's right. Working with Aidan and against the police and the fedswho want to deport her to Britain: she's lost the job that guaranteed her status, and there's the little matter of an unlicensed gunshe traces her tormentor to his sordid roots in Louisiana. Only now does Gallagher (Nightmare, with Angel, 1993) allow the slam-bang pace of his story to flag, as he labors to fill in dysfunctional family background that makes Tim more human but distinctly less intimidating. (It doesn't help his reputation that some of his victims, like Tim himself, show a lamentably anticlimactic disinclination to stay dead.) This modulation, though, prepares for an original and chilling payoff: Ruth, echoing Tim's original mothlike attraction to her, becomes so obsessed with himwith finding him, killing him, dying together with himthat it begins to look as if the real danger is to anybody who might get in her way. A satisfyingly twisty suspenser with a truly menacing villain. (Literary Guild/Mystery Guild alternate selections)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-345-38644-2
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1995
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
An unusual and mesmerizing novel, gracefully written and deeply disturbing.
In her first novel to be published in English, South Korean writer Han divides a story about strange obsessions and metamorphosis into three parts, each with a distinct voice.
Yeong-hye and her husband drift through calm, unexceptional lives devoid of passion or anything that might disrupt their domestic routine until the day that Yeong-hye takes every piece of meat from the refrigerator, throws it away, and announces that she's become a vegetarian. Her decision is sudden and rigid, inexplicable to her family and a society where unconventional choices elicit distaste and concern that borders on fear. Yeong-hye tries to explain that she had a dream, a horrifying nightmare of bloody, intimate violence, and that's why she won't eat meat, but her husband and family remain perplexed and disturbed. As Yeong-hye sinks further into both nightmares and the conviction that she must transform herself into a different kind of being, her condition alters the lives of three members of her family—her husband, brother-in-law, and sister—forcing them to confront unsettling desires and the alarming possibility that even with the closest familiarity, people remain strangers. Each of these relatives claims a section of the novel, and each section is strikingly written, equally absorbing whether lush or emotionally bleak. The book insists on a reader’s attention, with an almost hypnotically serene atmosphere interrupted by surreal images and frighteningly recognizable moments of ordinary despair. Han writes convincingly of the disruptive power of longing and the choice to either embrace or deny it, using details that are nearly fantastical in their strangeness to cut to the heart of the very human experience of discovering that one is no longer content with life as it is.
An unusual and mesmerizing novel, gracefully written and deeply disturbing.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-553-44818-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2015
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