Soviet spy maven Finder (The Moscow Club, 1991) adapts to the disappearance of the Red Menace—without missing a step—by following the trail of $10 billion spirited out of Russia to protect it from hard-liners: a fortune in gold that's rearranging a lot of loyalties from Moscow to Washington. The hunt for the money begins when Ben Ellison—a former CIA loose cannon who's taken refuge in patent law from his bloody past (his wife Laura was killed and his boss Toby Thompson paralyzed when an East German defection went horribly wrong) and from his hotheaded nature—is pressed by CIA-director-designate Alexander Truslow to go after Vladimir Orlov, the KGB chief who arranged the transfer of the gold. The transfer was done with the help of Harrison Sinclair— Truslow's predecessor at the Agency and the late father of Ben's second wife Molly—in return for a KGB file dishing the dirt on CIA higher-ups. When Ben turns Truslow down, a CIA investigation of his broker freezes his assets—and then, when Ben grudgingly agrees to cooperate, Truslow arranges a lie-detector screening that's actually a cover for giving Ben a jolt of the extrasensory, mind-reading powers Truslow thinks he'll need to track down Orlov and the money. What Ben's extraordinary powers tell him along the way, of course, is that his CIA masters aren't just interested in returning the gold to Mother Russia: the folks Orlov's file was fingering want to cover themselves and their grasp on the missing bullion by using Ben as a cat's paw and assassinating a mysterious witness before he can blow their covert operation sky-high in Congressional testimony. Can indestructible Ben, staggering from a brace of revelations about the deaths of Laura and Sinclair, identify the witness in time to stop the assassination—or will he be killed himself, as a prefatory note darkly hints? The complex story purrs along like a high-powered race car loaded with options, even though it all boils down to Telepathic Man and a bunch of lesser guys with guns after the big score. (First printing of 100,000)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-345-38621-3
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1993
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
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