Icarus

From Barnes & Noble

If Jack Keller grows fidgety around windows, he has good cause. When he was just ten years old, his mother was murdered, flung from a skyscraper. Then decades later, just when it seems that his life has settled into happily-married prosperity, Keller must confront another death and defenestration; that of his own beloved wife. The author of Gideon has concocted a pulse-throbbing thriller that deserves comparison with Alfred Hitchcock's obsessional tales.

Publishers Weekly

From ex-Villard publisher Peter Gethers and mystery writer David Handler, the pseudonymous duo who penned Gideon (1999), comes this overwritten yarn about a restaurateur It seems incredible that flaws such as meandering POV and lapses into journalistic (omniscient) expository asides could come from such well-versed professionals. However, readers who suffer through the sluggish first 100 pages will be rewarded to find that the novel eventually takes hold and moves briskly forward. Fatherless 10-year-old Jack Keller watches a madman hurl his mother out of a Manhattan skyscraper window and is saved from the same fate by his wannabe stepfather, a successful butcher who takes him in. At 20, Jack meets Caroline, a drop-dead gorgeous Virginia belle at Columbia University. They marry and open Jack's, a trendy New York City eatery. In four years, they own branches in Chicago, L.A., Miami and Paris. Unable to have children, they adopt Kid, a charismatic youth who, on his way to athletic fame at St. John's University, suddenly vanishes. To get on with her life, Caroline goes to hometown Charlottesville to open a restaurant. On opening day, she is brutally murdered by a masked man who also wounds Jack so badly he is left in a wheelchair. Soon the chimerical Kid shows up with a degree in physical therapy and gets Jack back on his feet. But Kid doesn't last long. When his leap from his penthouse is ruled suicide, Jack knows he must get to the bottom of the chain of deaths, no matter what the cost. Spoiled by an hors d'oeuvre tray of twists, a buffet of subplots and a glut of trivia, this chiller is plagued by the same flaws as the overstuffed (but bestselling) Gideon. (July) Copyright 2001 CahnersBusiness Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Defenestration is the buzzword in this thriller about a New York restaurateur who's haunted by murder at various stages of his otherwise picture-perfect life. The story opens with a burst of uncontrollable violence: young Jack Keller witnesses his mother being tossed out a 17th-floor window of an office building by a madman, and is himself nearly thrown out. Just before the incident he had been leaning flat against the window pretending he was flying-hence, Icarus. Andrews (Gideon, 1999) slows down the pace over the next 60 or so pages as we follow Jack's life: Columbia University, marriage, and a string of extremely popular, but unpretentious restaurants called Jack's. Then madness hits again: On opening night of a new Jack's in Virginia, Jack's wife is murdered by a thief-she's shot and tossed out a window-and Jack is so badly wounded he hovers near death. His painful recovery is aided by a long-lost protege with the pugilistic-sounding name of Kid Demeter. Like the Greek Goddess who's his namesake, Kid has a few mysteries of his own; he's actually a more interesting character than Jack, and his story nearly commandeers the narrative. But when Kid also turns up dead-off the roof this time, instead of out the window-Jack is determined to uncover the mysteries. Along the way he discovers the connection between Kid's murder and his wife's, but his investigation leads to more death. The build-up here is far more gripping, predictably, than the climax: in this instance, so many people are murdered there aren't enough suspects left to stymie a successful guess. A credible-enough page-turner with enough quirky New York types to drive the plot along, though you can't helpnoticing that (with the exception of Kid and a couple peripheral gangsters in a flashback) all of the eventually dead characters are independent-minded women.