Blue Wolf Reviews

Tag: Manhattan

  • Twelve Hours in Manhattan

    Twelve Hours in Manhattan

    Bianca is facing absolute despair. She tried her best to make a very good pitch which was rejected in the most devastating manner. She is in massive debt and has been sitting in the bar unable to move in any one direction. She knows she should go to her hotel room and then, in the clear light of morning try and work out what to do.

    A tall, dark handsome a man walks up and stands next to her and they begin to chat. He asks her to sit with him at his table and share his wine. So begins a night of magic, a night when two people, who both want so desperately to be able to spend some time, doing something that is as far away from their everyday life as possible, come together to do just that: enjoy a magical moment in time, for just one short night only.

    Eric is a famous Korean K-Drama star, Park Hyun Min; she is a thirty something woman facing destitution if she can’t get some sort of job soon. He wants anonymity, she simply wants out of her tragedy that is a life.

    Together they spend the night discovering the very essence that is Manhattan; eating ice-cream, dodging fans, sitting on the steps of beautiful Church, talking about all the important things in life before finally paying a visit to the very top of the Empire State Building.

    Bianca can’t help falling more than a little in love with this amazingly gentle man, he also is beginning to fall deeply in love with Bianca. She was already in love with him, via his action movies, but as the early morning light begins to break over the City, Bianca has to make a decision, to stay or go. She chooses to go.

    Tragedy is lying in wait which shatters her world. Over the next two years she has only one thing that keeps her going; her love of Eric, a man she met for one night only. Fate is waiting in the wings and as Bianca slowly begins to rebuild her life, she learns to accept that good things can and will and do sometimes happen.

    Twelve Hours in Manhattan is delicately written, entwining the many aspect of love, family, loyalty and acceptance into what could be considered as a modern Cinderella story, that deals carefully with the very emotions that are often pushed to one side in the modern world. The strength of family and friends when life gets tough, the wonderful side story of Bianca’s mother and the distress this causes, is very real.

    Not Sleepless in Seattle with Meg Ryan as Bianca tends to feel it is, in her surreal night of romance, but far earthier and once the story begins to unfold, very difficult to leave to one side, even though the conclusion is not difficult to figure out.

    Twelve Hours in Manhattan is a great read for a weekend away or for relaxing into on your holiday.

  • Too Soon Dead

    Too Soon Dead

    This is a wonderful ‘Who Dunn-it’ written in the best of the tradition bringing the world of 1930’s  New York, the years of prohibition, the Great Depression and the era where anything could, and often did, happen on the streets of Manhattan alive once again.

    Morgan De Witt is the assistant to famous columnist Alexander Brass, a man whose word is read daily and syndicated across America. De Witt considers he is very fortunate to be Brasses right-hand man and do-it all to this well respected columnist. That De Witt is also attempting to write his first novel is of considerable importance to DeWitt but not to anyone else.

    Alexander Brass, a revered and in some ways feared member of Manhattan Society, often finds himself working on matters that are not always society gossip, or related to current events; matters which test his intellect to the limit.

    When a man arrives in Brasses office offering a packet of photographs, refusing to give either his name or any details about the package, Brass is intrigued; even more so when he opens the packet discovering seriously compromising pictures of a number of the elite members of Manhattan Society. 

    According to the ‘fat man’ who delivered the pictures, it is not the pictures that are important but who took them and why. He refuses to add any further details, saying that the photographs are all part of a story well worth the telling, but in doing so a good deal of trouble and danger could be created. Trouble for everyone!

    Brass decides to try and find the ‘fat man’, seconding newsman Billy Fox to ‘tail’ the man, but when Fox turns up dead, Brass realises that whatever is behind the photographs is definitely deadly and there is someone out there who will stop at nothing to get them back.

    Brass is devastated that this should happen to such a young man carrying out what should have been a simple surveillance task and recruits the seriously intellectual capacity of his secretary Gloria Adams, the nightclub knowledge of Billy Fox’s widow, Cathy, Inspector Willem Raab who reluctantly agrees to share information with Brass, and of course De Witt, who amongst all the uproar is still trying to write his novel, and sets out to find out what the real issue is behind the incriminating pictures.

    Add a group of what appear to be eccentric Germans, a Nazi underground movement, along with a stripper and a nymphomaniac and you have a ripper of a story.

    Each of the characters is well portrayed and easy to create in the imagination which is a true hallmark of well written fiction such as this period style, murder mystery. The streets and back allies of Manhattan are well portrayed; the atmosphere of the 1930’s pervades every page adding colour and entertainment to the plot.

    Utterly engrossing, Manhattan, Alexander Brass style, during the 1930’s is very difficult tear yourself away from as this intriguing drama unfolds and climaxes in the most surprizing manner!