Tailor-made for the potentially huge X-Men audience that can’t be bothered scanning all those comic-book pictures or hiking...
Sandford reaches back to the dim past before his fabulously popular Lucas Davenport thrillers (Easy Prey, p. 327, etc.) to resurrect his even pulpier hero, artist/hacker/design-thief Kidd (The Empress File, 1992, not reviewed), for this tale of computer skullduggery on an epic scale.
When her brother Jack Morrison is shot dead, allegedly while breaking into a sensitive area at the Dallas firm of AmMath, Lane Ward follows his posthumous directive to “get in touch with Kidd.” It’s good advice, since Kidd immediately sets Lane’s mind at rest about her brother’s ethics by insisting that Jack would never have been carrying a gun on such a routine errand. Instead, he wonders what AmMath, encryption specialists who’ve been working on a code for a new generation of computer chips that will allow Uncle Sam to read everybody’s mail, might have had on Jack that made them want to set him up. The answer follows shortly with the news that a conspiracy of hackers calling themselves Firewall has brought the IRS to its knees by flooding it with bogus electronic returns. The only problem with the report is that Kidd, a member of Firewall, doesn’t know anything about this latest act of civil disobedience. Neither do any of the other Firewallers he gets in touch with. Realizing that AmMath CEO St. John Corbeil is setting up Firewall just as he set up Jack, Kidd and his friend LuEllen, whose specialty is stealing the portable property that’s too bulky for Kidd, go into full action mode with half a dozen brainy, well-armed specialist allies. The fur flies furiously, though the plot, fueled by endless, mindless action scenes punctuated by macho posturing from characters of every gender, soon sags into monotony.
Tailor-made for the potentially huge X-Men audience that can’t be bothered scanning all those comic-book pictures or hiking out to the bijou.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2000
ISBN: 0-399-14650-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2000
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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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