Sharp, fast, and slick. Ferrigno (Scavenger Hunt, 2003, etc.) can read like Raymond Chandler on speed, with pages turning...
A mysterious Special Ops fixer makes the mistake of taking his job too personally.
Frank Thorpe, an army vet who was booted from Delta Force for starting a civil war in South America, knows how to get things done and doesn’t mind bending the rules. After Delta, Frank went to work for a “shop,” a shadowy private task force that did jobs the government couldn’t afford to take on itself. The shops don’t exactly play by Marquess of Queensbury rules, but Frank was a loose cannon even by their standards, and one of them let him go after he botched a technology-smuggling sting and got one of his comrades killed. Shell-shocked and unemployed, he wanders aimlessly about LA until one day he sees a Mexican peddler manhandled at the airport by a pompous businessman. Outraged, he calls on his undercover contacts to track down the bully, who turns out to be a Newport Beach art dealer named Doug Meachum. Frank then poses as a State Department art-smuggling rep and tells one of Meachum’s customers that the priceless Mayan artifact Meachum sold her is a fake. The customer, a social-climbing drug dealer named Missy Riddenhauser, goes ballistic and sends her sociopathic brother Cecil off to whack the bitchy gossip columnist who exposes the “fraud” in a local paper, and the whole affair kind of snowballs from there. Frank, meanwhile, is still trying to track down the engineer who blew his IT sting and killed his partner. All his friends in the shops tell him the same thing: Revenge is bad for business, a waste of time, and too dangerous for a smart guy to bother with. They’re right. But Frank, who believes in loyalty and justice, has some serious gaps in his education.
Sharp, fast, and slick. Ferrigno (Scavenger Hunt, 2003, etc.) can read like Raymond Chandler on speed, with pages turning and adrenaline pretty high throughout.Pub Date: Aug. 3, 2004
ISBN: 0-375-42249-8
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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