An entertaining and compulsively readable thriller—on the beach or anywhere.
In this debut novel, a Cape Cod cop’s homecoming takes a deadly turn when a Secret Service agent ends up murdered and an assassination plot is discovered before the U.S. president’s vacation visit.
Who says you can’t go home again? Pepper Ryan was the former “wonderboy” of the New Albion Police Department. But three years ago, a disastrous bust gone awry compelled him to quit the force, grab his guitar, and head for Austin, Los Angeles, and Nashville. No sooner does he return home and rejoin the department than a dead Secret Service agent is found on the beach in a clambake pit with a red starfish on his chest. “Back in uniform two days and the kooky shit’s already started,” a veteran officer greets Pepper. And it shows no signs of letting up as the president plans to come to New Albion to hit up a dying but disenchanted billionaire backer for continued financial support. The unpopular president’s imminent arrival brings out the cranks and protesters and one very credible assassination threat. Pepper, who knows the area and the locals, is assigned to collaborate with the Secret Service. He works in the shadows of his retired father, the former chief of police, and his brother, “the finest young homicide detective in Boston in the last twenty years” until he is gunned down trying to foil a robbery. As for Pepper, his fellow officers have started a pool to bet how long his current tenure with the force will last. There’s nothing like a good redemption story to launch a series of procedural thrillers. But while Pepper is looking for a chance to prove himself, he doesn’t quite fit the pulp profile; he’s young, he’s handsome, and he’s not divorced, an alcoholic, or in thrall to any vices. Except for the previous flameout, he seems to be a good cop. Fagan doesn’t push a hard-boiled tone. He has a good ear for dialogue and a vivid sense of place, which he has populated with memorable and credible characters, including Pepper’s high school flame—a jet-setter whose father is the ailing benefactor hosting the president—and the two hit men who are adding to the area body count as well as old friends and new enemies who have the hero in their sights.
An entertaining and compulsively readable thriller—on the beach or anywhere.Pub Date: June 28, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-73245-960-1
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Fireclay Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 31, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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