Frieden has churned out a solid espionage novel that respectfully employs a real-world tragedy to great effect.
In Frieden’s (Tranquility Denied, 2007, etc.) second Jonathan Brooks thriller, the maritime lawyer, looking into a mysterious drowning, finds himself in the midst of competing international spies and agencies.
It’s August 2005, and Hurricane Katrina is making its way to New Orleans. Jonathan Brooks, skeptical of the impending storm, is slow to evacuate, but soon has good reason for his delay: Mariya, a dangerous Russian spy who helped Jonathan a decade ago, has asked him to check the morgue for her nephew, Igor, who supposedly drowned. A deceased Asian man there is clearly not related to the Russian woman, although the attorney, for reasons not entirely apparent, falsely identifies the body. But as Katrina lays siege to New Orleans, Jonathan is stuck inside the Crescent City before he can get any info to the Russian woman. It’s abundantly clear that a coverup has begun when Jonathan and the pathologist, who’ve deduced that the corpse was a crewman, are attacked by unknown assailants. Jonathan finds the vessel on which the dead man may have been stationed, and he and Mariya head to Panama on a mission so covert that even Mariya isn’t entirely aware of the details—but she knows that something is making the Russians nervous. The author has concocted a labyrinthine but diverting spy story; various players—Mossad, North Korea and a couple of CIA assets—are given airtime, but their involvement isn’t wholly clarified until the end. Jonathan is the focus, and his story, with Hurricane Katrina filling the first half of the novel, is first-rate. The real-world setting is resounding, particularly because Katrina is palpable; its “gusts of wind” and sky “an ominous charcoal hue” are early signs of the inevitable devastation to follow. The novel’s latter half sustains an overall uneasiness by an uncertainty surrounding Mariya; Jonathan never fully trusts her. The Russians, meanwhile, have lost a few agents, and Jonathan helps them, paving the way for his more active role in the frenetic action sequences. But none of the gunfights or villains is a match for Hurricane Katrina. The storm renders an entire city helpless.
Frieden has churned out a solid espionage novel that respectfully employs a real-world tragedy to great effect.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-0974793443
Page Count: 468
Publisher: Avendia Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 10, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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