Promotes concepts aimed at Christian readers, but it’s first and foremost a thriller that will reel in genre fans.
Folks looking to settle in a Colorado community are made to feel unwelcome by a batch of unruly—and often dangerous—locals in Lippincott’s Christian thriller debut.
Karen Gustafson moves to the small town of Rock Creek, Colorado, for a teaching job at the high school. She quickly spots copious illicit activities, from drugs to prostitution, to which cops have apparently turned a blind eye. But it’s the Blair House that causes the most trouble. If the property is condemned, the profitable water and mineral rights could be up for grabs. Consequently, the townsfolk are decidedly unfriendly to new arrivals in Rock Creek, fearing that they might want to stake a claim to the Blair House. Karen and others, including Rob and Ruth Browning, a couple repairing their fractured marriage, brave harassment and occasional assaults. An unsolved murder, meanwhile, may indicate that a killer calls the community home. Strong Christian themes highlight Lippincott’s novel: many characters, including Karen and rancher/interim pastor (and Karen’s romantic interest) Adam Claymore, are devout Christians often inspired by biblical passages. But the religious subject matter doesn’t overwhelm the story since characters are struggling, imperfect humans relatable to any reader. The Brownings, for instance, recently separated prior to reuniting in neighboring Ridge View, and even Karen has a secret (she didn’t leave her last job voluntarily). The story’s main focus is the Blair House, which also involves a mysterious trenchcoat-donning stranger staying at the house and an equally strange woodcutter who waters and whittles on a long-dead tree on the desired property. The recent strangulation death of Gloria Jones, on the other hand, is a much less intriguing subplot. Karen, it seems, enters a murder mystery already in progress; a missing teacher—who may have witnessed the killing—left the position Karen’s there to fill. That mystery is likewise resolved without much intervention from the protagonist. By the time the novel ends, the general unease surrounding the Blair House is still an issue, aptly setting the stage for a planned sequel.
Promotes concepts aimed at Christian readers, but it’s first and foremost a thriller that will reel in genre fans.Pub Date: Dec. 12, 2014
ISBN: 978-1490858142
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Westbow Press
Review Posted Online: April 16, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
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