An Argentine banker disappears in a fiery plane crash just before his bank is shown to be missing 50 or so million dollars. Sorting through the financial and emotional wreckage, his newly pregnant wife finds that the banker had not completely shed his radical past. This time out, Victor (Friends, Lovers, Enemies, 1991; Misplaced Lives, 1990, etc.) successfully stirs politics into a dish of romantic thrills. When half-Argentine Coriander, a Brooklyn physician, fell in love with Danny Vidal, she was a student at the University of Cordoba, he was a handsome professor, and the loathsome colonels were snatching young people from the streets of Buenos Aires and failing to return them. Danny was at the heart of the revolutionary movement and would probably have made political use of Coriander, whose father was the American ambassador, had he not himself been swept away by her beauty. Their affair was aborted by the underground war, and Coriander went on to study and work in the US, living alone until Danny, now apparently a free-marketer, turned up as president of a Latin-Manhattan bank with marriage on his mind. The sexually stupendous Vidal match ends when Danny suddenly decamps for the Southern Hemisphere. His plane goes up in flames over Mexico, and Coriander believes him dead—until assistant district attorney Adam Singer breaks the news that her apparently late husband seemed to have looted his bank of all its capital. Coriander flies to Mexico, sees that what is supposed to be the largest chunk of her husband is not, and begins to work with Adam, who's fallen for her, to find out just what her husband was up to. The trail takes them all the way back to the 70's and Coriander learns that Danny never really gave up politics. What threatens to be a goopy, glitzy medical-soaper turns out to be a serious, largely successful political thriller.
Pub Date: April 1, 1993
ISBN: 1-55611-353-6
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Donald Fine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 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
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
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