The latest adventure in a series that only grows more engaging with each installment.
In the sixth book in Kane’s (Baksheesh Bribes, 2015, etc.) Spies Lie series, a motley crew of spies, hackers, and mercenaries unites to stop China and Russia from declaring war on the United States.
Former Mossad spymaster Yigdal Ben-Levy is dying of cancer, but he refuses to live out his remaining days in hospice. Rather, he’s dead set on getting from Washington, D.C., to the United Nations General Assembly in New York City so that he can warn its members of a plot cooked up by Russia and China to attack America. What’s bad for the United States is bad for Israel, and Ben-Levy refuses to die with his beloved country in limbo after devoting his entire life to keeping it safe. In order to make it to the U.N. without getting killed by Russian and Chinese assassination squads, he calls on Jon Sommers, a former Mossad recruit who’s now working as a banker in New York. Sommers is furious with Ben-Levy, who’s responsible for the death of his fiancee, but when the dying man calls on him in his hour of need, he reluctantly agrees to help. He teams up with Israeli soldier–turned-mercenary Avram Shimmel, expert hacker William Wing, and former covert operative Cassandra Sashakovich, a Russian, to get the job done. The strengths of this thriller are its lack of especially graphic violence and relatively straightforward plotline, both of which make it more accessible than previous installments. Other Spies Lie stories occasionally got so complicated that it was difficult to keep track of whom to root for. The story here essentially boils down to a long chase scene, packed with action movie set pieces that wouldn’t be out of place in a Michael Bay film. Kane neatly ties up all the loose ends left over from the roller-coaster story arc that began in Bloodridge (2014) while also setting up Jon, Cassie, Avram, William, and company for further adventures together, which will please fans and give newcomers an opportunity to enter this addictive fictional world.
The latest adventure in a series that only grows more engaging with each installment.Pub Date: Nov. 27, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-9862321-6-9
Page Count: 338
Publisher: The Swiftshadow Group, Inc.
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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