Spruill (My Soul to Take, 1994, etc.) has a grip on the medical suspense/horror novel far firmer than Robin Cook's. This time out, he sets up what could be the really well-done kickoff novel of a series about hungry hemophages (bloodeaters). Dr. Katie O'Keefe, a hematologist, must crack the resistance of a fantastic new strain of red blood cells to all forms of attack. Some biter-madman in D.C. is ripping open women's throats and leaving drained bodies in churches, beginning with the National Cathedral. Pooled in the ear of his first victim is the killer's own fresh blood—blood that doesn't dry or clot. The medical examiner sees this non-drying blood as beyond his expertise and calls in Katie to run tests for him. Then more fresh blood turns up on later victims—blood that will not die! Detective Merrick Chapman, Katie's ex-lover, knows very well who the killer is: his own son, Zane, whom Merrick hasn't seen in 400 years. Both are hemophages—and Merrick himself is over 900 years old, although he looks only 30 what with his superblood. Centuries ago, though, Merrick gave up murdering victims, learned to drain out enough blood to survive while putting victims in a trance, and began tracking down and imprisoning in an underground vault all the hemophages he could find. But Zane, who has outwitted his father so far, at last plans to meet him face to face and kill him. Meanwhile, Zane discovers that Jenny, a 12-year-old leukemia victim dying under Katie's care, is actually his own daughter—and he saves her life by feeding her blood orally. Now Merrick must kill his own son—and granddaughter as well—if he is to wipe out the scourge. But he has his own young son, Gregory, with Katie, and Zane's threats on Katie and Gregory bring on a Mexican standoff with his father. Terrific plotting—fresh indeed—and the hospital background shines in a seemingly unresolvable love story about a man who has already outlived 16 wives and 43 children.
Pub Date: July 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-312-13163-1
Page Count: 368
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 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
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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