A charismatic new action hero worth following on further missions.
Mark Zuckerberg meets James Bond in this origin story that’s part international terrorism thriller, part wish fulfillment fantasy.
In her first novel, Bourne attempts to reshape the past. Her main character is based on cherished former colleague Danny Lewin, an elite commando in the Israeli Defense Force’s Sayeret Matkal and founder of Akamai Technologies. Lewin was on Flight 11 out of Boston on Sept. 11, 2001. In a powerful and poignant author’s note, Bourne writes that a government report found that Lewin “fought to defend the stewardesses and cockpit from the hijackers,” who cut his throat. His heroics inspired this propulsive race-against-time narrative. Edwin Hoff, code named Raptor, is introduced in a suspenseful prologue in which he destroys a ricin manufacturer and his alter ego is revealed: an Internet entrepreneur and motivational guru about to take his company public. “It’s the chocolate factory, and you have one of the golden tickets,” he tells one employee in need of his mentorship. Edwin is charged with foiling a 9/11 plot to unleash a weaponized pneumonic plague aboard one of the hijacked aircrafts. That’s only the beginning of the globe-trotting adventure that transports readers from the Caribbean to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Cairo and other international locales. Bourne deftly juggles the action with informed yet accessible writing about the dot-com boom and subsequent bust while advancing the story through the perspectives of a gallery of vividly drawn supporting characters. While the book doesn’t exactly set one’s hair on fire—a term Bourne uses to describe Edwin’s inspirational genius—it handily delivers the genre goods. Fortunately, a sequel’s on the way.
A charismatic new action hero worth following on further missions.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-9839807-0-4
Page Count: 370
Publisher: Watch Hill Books
Review Posted Online: July 8, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
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