Catnip for conspiracy theorists and fans of fast-paced thrillers.
Murder by jungle lion gets this CIA–laced story off to a rousing start.
In Paper’s (Perfect, 2010, etc.) debut novel, attorney Jeff Roberts reads a disturbing letter written by his father before his death. Soon Jeff believes that his phone is tapped and that he is being watched. Frightened, he decides to take a long vacation in Africa with girlfriend Nicole Landow, but their photographic safari ends when Jeff has a deadly encounter with a lion. After his death, which may have involved criminal activity, Jeff’s sister Kelly receives their dad’s unsettling letter. In his dispatch, Ted Roberts admits that when he was a White House CIA case officer in the 1960s, he played a part in John F. Kennedy’s assassination. The letter includes coded information to be directed to the JFK Assassination Records Review Board. Kelly, dumbfounded by her father’s confession, shares the letter with Senate staffer and Navy SEAL Jim Roth, Jeff’s best friend. Horrifying as its contents are, the letter itself is bad juju. Almost anyone reading it—Jim and Kelly included—soon encounters dangerous situations, and some who are shown the missive even end up dead. In fact, CIA Director Kay Brownstein suggests Kelly leave well enough alone to avoid taking “deadly risks” (but of course, she doesn’t listen). As conspiracy theories go, Paper, a Washington, D.C., attorney, offers an intriguing one that links top-level U.S. officials to the assassination. Dialogue and pacing are superb, and the chapter in which the safari tour company is sued in court is authoritatively well-written. But the use of italic type for large sections of text is daunting; italics are used for revealing past events, characters’ memories, and the contents of letters. Regarding the last, Kelly takes to writing to her dead father, which seems an inelegant way of providing exposition. It’s also almost comical that nearly every time someone sits on a chair or couch, it is made of leather. In addition, characters far too frequently nurse, swig, sip, or take long swallows of beer or wine.
Catnip for conspiracy theorists and fans of fast-paced thrillers.Pub Date: July 15, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-692-62147-9
Page Count: -
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 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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