A playful, well-researched thriller that remains romantically genuine throughout.
This third volume of a series finds a family of lawmen—and a veterinarian—trying to thwart a scheme to manipulate the populace with microchips.
Megan Chauner is a veterinarian in the Portland, Oregon, area. When she receives a strange package from her best friend, investigative reporter Jackie Milburn, she follows its instructions. Megan pulls up stakes and rents a remote cabin, hoping to keep the package—containing evidence of unethical work performed by CSV Pharmaceuticals—secure. The company's research revolves around quantum tunneling and carbon nano tubes as drug delivery systems. When Megan learns that Jackie has been killed, she fears that she’s next. Heavy footsteps arrive outside the cabin, and she and Leyna, a white shepherd dog, stand ready. But the grizzly sized man who’s arrived is none other than Detective Lucas McAllister, part-time resident of the cabin. Still wounded from the gang-related ambush that killed his partner, Lucas is easily tranquilized and trussed up by Megan. After a cooling-off period, he decides to help her investigate the sinister plans of CSV and the company ClickChip, which makes implantable chips that can dissolve inside a living organism, leaving no trace of the owner’s manipulation. But Lucas has lost one partner in the line of duty. Does he dare place another in jeopardy? Though the sex jokes fly with campy abandon, Garrett (Bound by Shadows, 2017, etc.) ensures that the hero’s emotional healing remains the backbone of the narrative. In the first half, readers will likely titter at the verbal foreplay between Megan and Lucas, as when she says, “Make it quick, since that’s probably your trademark.” Despite an instant physical attraction, their romance develops organically. Later the McAllister clan appears, including Caden, Ethan, and Billy, as well as Lexi Donovan, the hacker from Digital Velocity (2017). Garrett keeps the science components accessible, as in the line “The chip is a polymer that dissolves when the temperature drops, as in when the animal dies.” Those unfamiliar with the McAllisters should enjoy this installment, though a full series read will deliver the maximum emotional impact.
A playful, well-researched thriller that remains romantically genuine throughout.Pub Date: March 26, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9989265-3-7
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Garrett Publishing
Review Posted Online: April 26, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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