A millennial thriller about biological terrorism and the quest for peace in the Middle East.
An American James Bond for the 21st century, Jason Stouter slices through conspiracies, double crosses and even a few femme fatales in this continent-hopping technological thriller inspired as much by Ian Fleming’s flair for the tongue in cheek and dramatic as by the precision of detail and exciting speculation mastered by Tom Clancy and Michael Crichton. The narrative wastes little time establishing Stouter as a strong, uncompromising former intelligence officer with nary a chink in his armor, save for one thing—his son. The brilliant, shrewd Dr. Chance Bonnard, who has a suspicious passion for counterterrorism and devious quid pro quos, offers Stouter a chance to save his ill son’s life, but only if he’ll do Bonnard a whopping geopolitical favor and return to the shadow world of international espionage. Stouter is no spring chicken and does his research using old friends and ex-contacts, but he’s made a Faustian bargain; Bonnard and his group want to use the threat of a decimating virus to scare the Middle East into peaceful submission, but Kahlil Zufar, an old thorn in Stouter’s side, has other plans for the virus and Stouter must thwart them while still finding a way to save his son. Many novels crumble under such pressures, but Stouter’s headlong plunge and the story’s sophisticated plotting keeps things just on this side of believability. Many of the novel’s main movements begin with a wire service news flash or a transcript of a cable anchor’s reportage that give the reader the addicting advantage of feeling that they’re in on the real story, the moral conundrums and complexities that constitute the empty distillations of news networks’ headlines. It’s a clever structure for the genre that not only provides a broader political commentary, but legitimizes the more whimsical aspects of Stouter’s adventures as they build to a near pitch-perfect ending. A book tailor-made for fans of high-tech, high-stakes intrigue.
Pub Date: July 30, 2011
ISBN: 978-1257880058
Page Count: 332
Publisher: Lulu
Review Posted Online: Aug. 25, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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