On the track of child killers with global reach, a dogged investigator uncovers a plot that gives new meaning to ecclesiastic militancy, in a chillingly effective debut by the pseudonymous Case. Joe Lassiter, the head of a transnational security firm, is devastated by the inexplicable murders of his sister Kathy and her young son Brandon. When the only suspect in the crime, a closemouthed Italian, escapes from a Virginia hospital's prison ward, he assigns himself to the case. Lassiter follows a winding trail that leads him around Europe to Naples (home of Umbra Domini, an ultraconservative Roman Catholic order committed to the church's old, preVatican II ways) and subsequently to a mountain village in Umbria. In this remote hamlet, he learns that a world-class geneticist named Ignazio Baresgi (since deceased) ran a clinic (now burned to the ground), which provided artificial-insemination services to a clientele that at one time included Kathy. Lassiter also learns that, before Baresi went into medicine, he was a respected theologian whose specialty was relics. Although the sinister Umbra Domini, headed by a charismatic priest named Silvio della Torre, and its legions of lay adherents on both sides of the Atlantic make several attempts to eliminate him, Lassiter persists in his inquiry. At length, he traces Dr. Baresi's only surviving patient—reclusive film star Callista Bates, who quit Hollywood cold at the height of her fame—to an island off the coast of Maine, where she lives quietly with her son, Jesse. Using Bates as a sounding board, Lassiter soon confirms his own suspicions that Baresi was using the remains of ancient holy men in ways that (thanks to a breach in confessional secrecy) sent Umbra Domini after him with a vengeance. Before the unarmed pair can act on their insights, however, they must deal with the deranged della Torre and his homicidal minions. A first-rate biotech thriller with an intriguing, if ungodly, religious twist.
Pub Date: April 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-449-91101-2
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1997
This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana.
The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense.
This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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