So well-adapted to the entire series, this could have been the late Tom Clancy’s second novel.
Not “too many months” after dispatching a tricky submarine issue in The Hunt for Red October, young Jack Ryan faces a deadly East German foe.
The trouble starts in 1985, near Area 51 in Nevada, where UFO believers witness a flash in the night sky and anticipate an extraterrestrial visit. Only the East German spy who happens to be among them suspects an earthly explanation. A woman guides him through a mountainous area, where he discovers the remains of a U.S. military aircraft he correctly presumes to be “beyond big” in importance. Making off with a small piece of the wing he must somehow smuggle across the Iron Curtain, he leaves a trail of dead and wounded in his wake. The U.S. suspects that someone has removed a piece of secret radar-absorbing material from the wreckage. Meanwhile in West Berlin, a low-level Foreign Service officer is asked to meet a possible defector, an encounter that takes a terrible turn. Meanwhile (this story has lots of meanwhiles), the East German aeronautical physicist Dr. Uwe Hauptman is doing important research on radar-absorbing surfaces. The CIA suspects it has a mole, whom they code-name Fledermaus. Jack Ryan and Mary Pat Foley cross through Checkpoint Charlie into East Berlin and bypass the “Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart,” known to us bourgeoisie as the Berlin Wall. There, they face a peck of trouble, but luckily, “Ryan wasn't exactly a neophyte when it came to hairy situations,” nor is Foley to be mistaken for a shrinking violet. Cameron is but one of the authors who so skillfully maintains the Clancy legacy that began in the 1980s. The many characters are all spot-on, the scope is wide-ranging, and the action reaches to the dreaded Hohenschönhausen Prison—readers are guaranteed to hate the freckle-faced guard Mitzi Graff as much as they will admire Ryan and Foley.
So well-adapted to the entire series, this could have been the late Tom Clancy’s second novel.Pub Date: Dec. 6, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-42275-5
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Oct. 11, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A pulpy throwback that shines a light on abuses even magic can’t erase.
Hung out to dry by the elders who betrayed them, a squad of pregnant teens fights back with old magic.
Hendrix has a flair for applying inventive hooks to horror, and this book has a good one, chock-full with shades of V.C. Andrews, The Handmaid’s Tale, and Foxfire, to name a few. Our narrator, Neva Craven, is 15 and pregnant, a fate worse than death in the American South circa 1970. She’s taken by force to Wellwood House in Florida, a secretive home for unwed mothers where she’s given the name Fern. She’ll have the baby secretly and give it up for adoption, whether she likes it or not. Under the thumb of the house’s cruel mistress, Miss Wellwood, and complicit Dr. Vincent, Neva forges cautious alliance with her fellow captives—a new friend, Zinnia; budding revolutionary Rose; and young Holly, raped and impregnated by the very family minister slated to adopt her child. All seems lost until the arrival of a mysterious bookmobile and its librarian, Miss Parcae, who gives the girls an actual book of spells titled How To Be a Groovy Witch. There’s glee in seeing the powerless granted some well-deserved payback, but Hendrix never forgets his sweet spot, lacing the story with body horror and unspeakable cruelties that threaten to overwhelm every little victory. In truth, it’s not the paranormal elements that make this blast from the past so terrifying—although one character evolves into a suitably scary antagonist near the end—but the unspeakable, everyday atrocities leveled at children like these. As the girls lose their babies one by one, they soon devote themselves to secreting away Holly and her child. They get some help late in the game but for the most part they’re on their own, trapped between forces of darkness and society’s merciless judgement.
A pulpy throwback that shines a light on abuses even magic can’t erase.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2025
ISBN: 9780593548981
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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