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
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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