An action-packed international tale with Christian overtones and strong characters.
In this paranormal thriller, a retired military commander races to save the world.
At the outset of this sequel, the United States is in tough shape. Massive weather disasters strike with alarming regularity; unemployment remains in the double digits; inflation is rampant (a loaf of bread costs over $5); and the country faces an incredibly divisive presidential election. This gloomy state of affairs is further darkened by three deadly assaults that happen in rapid succession: U.S. ambassador and consummate Washington insider Winston Tarmac is blown up in his limousine; Saleem Nasir, the prospective chief of staff to rising Republican star and presidential candidate Thomas Maro, is incinerated in his jeep; and Rio DeLaurentis, a political activist who’s just gone viral with a video in which she berates Congress as a bunch of “moronic a-holes,” is supposedly killed when a missile takes down her private plane. Rio and her retired colonel brother, Giacomo, are the children of Paolo DeLaurentis, whose accurate visions of the future before his death fueled the first installment of DiVerniero’s (Messenger From God, 2013) series. The attempted assassination of Giacomo’s sister (readers learn immediately that she survived and is in a coma, although almost everyone in the story thinks she’s dead) propels him into a continent-hopping mission to prevent what he’s seen in a vision of his own: the assassination of the U.S. president, plunging the world into even greater chaos. The key moments of that disaster were all foreseen by Paolo before he died, and periodically throughout the gripping book those prophecies are doled out posthumously in letters he left behind for his children. These missives predict in more or less specific terms incidents that begin to combine into a Christian end times picture that will culminate with something called “the last eulogy.” “This is the time,” Giacomo explains, “when we are given the last chance to right the wrongs before darkness falls upon us.” But before such apocalyptic events begin, there’s plenty of taut, Tom Clancy-style international intrigue to unfold, involving everything from a violent militia group called the Fighters for Freedom Brigade to the villain of the previous volume, Dr. Colin Payne, whose long shadow extends over the plot of this sequel. Giacomo is DiVerniero’s main action-hero focus for the global machinations because he has those posthumous notes guiding him as well as tantalizing visions of the future. But the author is here writing at the top of his form, and the book is filled with other enjoyably realized characters, particularly the hapless and overmatched American president, Arthur Waldron; his equally harried vice president, Jerry Richardson; and Maro, the son of a Muslim woman and a Coptic Christian man. Characters are constantly getting threatening phone calls from the sinister forces lurking behind the scenes as DiVerniero expertly ratchets up the plot’s tension before the fast-paced climax.
An action-packed international tale with Christian overtones and strong characters.Pub Date: Dec. 18, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-64237-408-7
Page Count: 478
Publisher: Gatekeeper Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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