Chippings from a master's chisel: ten short stories and an epilogue artfully disguised as a novel of post-glasnost reminiscences of espionage, all showing le Carre at his most nervously relaxed. Grand old man George Smiley agrees to address narrator Ned York's graduating class at Sarratt; his urbanely pointed remarks serve as the text for each of the retrospective anecdotes that follow. A few of these are slight and unexpectedly charming: Ned and company surround a mysterious Arab following a princeling's favorite wife in a Knightsbridge store, only to learn that he's been sent to pay for the trinkets she's shoplifting; Ned gets the news of Bill Haydon's unmasking (Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy) just after repairing a priceless tapestry he's drilled through in inserting a bug for the Vatican in a corrupt bishop's room; Smiley plays along with a dead criminal's pretense that he was with the service in order to comfort his grieving parents. But even the more substantial stories—Ned's old friend Ben Arno Cavendish goes to pieces after literally mislaying the documents that betray his network in Berlin; Ned recalls his suspicions of a Latvian sea captain's young, uncleared girlfriend; a raffish Hungarian agent tries to bolster his stock by arranging to have a friend of his defect as the agent's would-be assassin; Ned goes to Israel to interrogate a terrorist who lectures him savagely; an American in Vietnam endures torture and imprisonment for the sake of the half-Asian daughter who, he realizes, despises him; a low-level clerk is turned to counterespionage by a Russian-language radio program—even these pieces are graceful and curiously humorous in a way new to le Carre's work, though not to be compared in scope or intensity with the Smiley/Karla novels. The epilogue—a gunrunner's impassioned self-justification—will make you wonder just who the real enemy is. Le Carre's earlier novels have made distinguished films and TV miniseries; this one, sure to attract the author's usual huge print audience, reads like a series of sketches for a weekly program—say, Spies Who Came in from the Cold.
Pub Date: Jan. 14, 1990
ISBN: 0345504429
Page Count: -
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1990
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.
A man walks out of a bar and his life becomes a kaleidoscope of altered states in this science-fiction thriller.
Crouch opens on a family in a warm, resonant domestic moment with three well-developed characters. At home in Chicago’s Logan Square, Jason Dessen dices an onion while his wife, Daniela, sips wine and chats on the phone. Their son, Charlie, an appealing 15-year-old, sketches on a pad. Still, an undertone of regret hovers over the couple, a preoccupation with roads not taken, a theme the book will literally explore, in multifarious ways. To start, both Jason and Daniela abandoned careers that might have soared, Jason as a physicist, Daniela as an artist. When Charlie was born, he suffered a major illness. Jason was forced to abandon promising research to teach undergraduates at a small college. Daniela turned from having gallery shows to teaching private art lessons to middle school students. On this bracing October evening, Jason visits a local bar to pay homage to Ryan Holder, a former college roommate who just received a major award for his work in neuroscience, an honor that rankles Jason, who, Ryan says, gave up on his career. Smarting from the comment, Jason suffers “a sucker punch” as he heads home that leaves him “standing on the precipice.” From behind Jason, a man with a “ghost white” face, “red, pursed lips," and "horrifying eyes” points a gun at Jason and forces him to drive an SUV, following preset navigational directions. At their destination, the abductor forces Jason to strip naked, beats him, then leads him into a vast, abandoned power plant. Here, Jason meets men and women who insist they want to help him. Attempting to escape, Jason opens a door that leads him into a series of dark, strange, yet eerily familiar encounters that sometimes strain credibility, especially in the tale's final moments.
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.Pub Date: July 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-90422-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
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