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
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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