A dizzying spy story for readers with clear minds and steely constitutions.
In the second installment of the Spies Lie thriller series, a covert agent reunites with his allies as intelligence agencies battle over a revolutionary tracking device.
Master hacker William Wing discovers that someone has broken into his Hong Kong apartment and stolen all the secrets on his computer—secrets that belong to clients such as Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency. Afraid that he’ll be killed as a result of the breach, he reaches out to his friend Jon Sommers, a former Mossad assassin who’s now working undercover in a German bank (and having a hot-and-heavy romance with fellow spy Ruth Cohen). The thief is revealed to be Cassandra Sashakovich, an agent with an unnamed American intelligence agency who had been ratted out by a mole, raped by a terrorist and is now running for her life. The data she made off with includes plans for a tiny tracking gadget that allows one to see through the eyes of the person who swallows it; naturally, many people would kill to get their hands on it. Sommers brings together his few trusted allies, including hardened soldier Avram Shimmel, to help Wing and prevent the plans from falling into the wrong hands—but whose hands are the wrong ones? Kane (Bloodridge, 2014) purports to be a former spy himself, and his extensive knowledge of the ways that the world’s governments wage covert war on one another shines through in his incredibly detailed prose. At times, however, these details grow overwhelming and make it hard to keep track of who’s spying on whom and why. However, readers who adore action-packed thrillers in the vein of Robert Ludlum’s Bourne series will enjoy its many double-crossings. However, some readers should be warned: There are graphic scenes of torture excruciating enough to possibly make one’s stomach turn. Indeed, so many upsetting things happen to the main characters that it may be easy for readers to grow despondent about the state of the world by the time the story reaches its firestorm of a conclusion.
A dizzying spy story for readers with clear minds and steely constitutions.Pub Date: June 12, 2014
ISBN: 978-0996059138
Page Count: 354
Publisher: The Swiftshadow Group, Inc.
Review Posted Online: Oct. 24, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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
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