This brief adventure’s power comes more from its mystery than its characterization.
A legal thriller that thrusts a garden-variety attorney into the world of Argentinian organized crime.
Dennis Brunt is a low-ranking tax lawyer at his firm, so he’s surprised when he’s pulled into a major case and given a central role in it. It turns out that Gerhard Schmidt, a shady figure from the criminal underworld who’s under investigation for illegal arms trading, drug trafficking, and money laundering, personally asked for his involvement. It’s a peculiar request, as Brunt hasn’t been around long enough to make a name for himself. The attorney soon learns that both he and Schmidt are Argentinian; Brunt was sent away by his mother to the United States 30 years earlier, and he never returned or saw his mother again. Now he’s compelled to fly back to Argentina to learn about Schmidt’s business, and his client locates Brunt’s mother and orchestrates an emotional reunion. Meanwhile, the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, Brian Hannigan, doggedly pursues Schmidt’s prosecution, which sets Brunt in his cross hairs. In a subplot, Brunt starts to fall for an FBI agent who’s covertly investigating him, and their relationship becomes ever more complex as the connection between Brunt and Schmidt comes into sharper focus. Debut author Mankus, like his protagonist, is an attorney, so he writes with professional confidence and expertise. But although this is a brief novella, it’s overly crammed with parallel plotlines, and, as a result, it only fully develops Brunt’s character. More than just a legal thriller, this is also a complex family drama and a love story, and these latter narrative lines sometimes seem to extend beyond Mankus’ comfort zone as a writer. For example, when Brunt meets his estranged brother for the first time, he delivers this wooden line: “ ‘You’re my long-lost brother,’ Dennis said, ‘and I missed you very much.’ ” However, the author is adept at vividly depicting violent action, and the story’s pace is entertainingly relentless. There’s no shortage of unexpected twists, too, which will keep readers hungry for the next page.
This brief adventure’s power comes more from its mystery than its characterization.Pub Date: May 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5304-3828-0
Page Count: 120
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Aug. 14, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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