A smart, timely thriller that would benefit from less meandering into the minds of secondary characters.
With scheming scientists, abductions and romance, this globe-trotting debut thriller has something for everyone.
Early one evening in Arès, a quiet French village near the Atlantic coast, a retired nuclear power worker and stamp trader named Claude Moreau disappears while cycling home. When he’s discovered the next morning, he has no memory of where he’s been, but he has a hypodermic mark in his left shoulder, a sedative in his blood and a puncture in one of his veins. Unbeknownst to the fisherman, it was a casual conversation he’d had months before with a doctor specializing in nuclear medicine that placed him in the middle of an international race to perfect an anti-radiation medication. When Moreau chatted with the doctor, René Ebadi, about stamps in the Bordeaux Public Garden, Moreau mentioned that he’d been exposed to radiation. Although his co-workers’ tests showed signs of exposure, his did not. Ebadi bought a stamp and jogged home but started to wonder “if there was more to his non-reaction to the radiation exposure than he had let on, or was even aware of.” Simultaneously, in Pittsburgh, an American biotech company named Mirrenzyme was trying to bring its own anti-radiation medication to market. When one of Ebadi’s subordinates attends the European International Radiation Protection Association Congress in Paris, Mirrenzyme’s security team learns about the existence of a nuclear power worker with a suspected natural immunity to radiation. The possibility of a naturally occurring protein that could protect humans from radiation sets the novel’s main events in motion. Greenham takes the reader around the world as his characters endure abductions, fall in love and conduct scientific research. Will the French or the Americans be the first to develop a medication that can protect humans from radiation? The suspenseful opening scene successfully draws readers in, making them concerned for Moreau’s fate. Greenham also has a knack for weaving complex scientific and legal information into the narrative. For example, the consequences of radiation exposure are explained when, after being exposed to a dirty bomb, a U.S. senator discusses his test results with a doctor. Elsewhere, the otherwise breakneck pace is occasionally slowed by Greenham’s choice to dip into the thoughts of too many minor characters. For instance, at one point, he dives into the thoughts of Ebadi’s assistant, who plays a small role in the plot. These kinds of digressions occur too frequently for an otherwise taut actioner.
A smart, timely thriller that would benefit from less meandering into the minds of secondary characters.Pub Date: Dec. 7, 2012
ISBN: 978-1457516801
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Dog Ear Publishing
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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
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