A widely admired science-fiction writer returns to a favorite theme—biotechnology run amok—but this time entering the mainstream to offer up a thriller. FBI investigator Robert Cavanaugh is thrust into a murder case that keeps widening into new killings and that points simultaneously to the Cosa Nostra and the most advanced research in gene therapy. But Cavanaugh, as his superiors know, is hardly adequate to the task. An incurable romantic, he keeps embarrassing his ex-wife at work by sending her witty but odd faxes—until she puts a restraining order on him. No less well portrayed is Cavanaugh's informant, Judy Kozinski, a plump, unpretty woman married to an egotistical, unquestionably brilliant biologist who's murdered after a job interview with a mysterious biotechnical firm by the name of Verico. Then there's out-of-luck Wendell Botts, who, like Cavanaugh, is hopelessly in love with a woman who no longer loves him and who's gone over to a cult called the Soldiers of the Divine Covenant, taking their two children with her. A decent but tortured man, Botts is at last driven to violence when he can find no one to take his claim seriously that ritual human sacrifices are going on beyond the cult's barbed wire. It turns out that the murdered biologist was near a breakthrough in gene therapy that Verico, in league with the Cosa Nostra, planned to make use of for purposes that could have been enormous, altering the entire world's political landscape. Kress's first thriller passes muster, though her mafioso types are always offstage and far too efficiently evil to be believed. The author's real strengths lie in her ability to create characters who have recognizable frailties and sorrows, and pages that are simply brimming over with ideas.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-312-85961-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1995
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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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