A rookie Secret Service agent's troubles are only beginning when a scheming senator gets killed on her watch—in this fleet political thriller from Shelby, the Los Angeles-based author of This Far From Paradise (1988). Even if she'd followed the safety precautions she let Senator Charles Westbourne fatally tone down, Holland Tylo, left fatherless herself by an assassination 15 years ago, would have been no match for the hired killer who calls himself Preacher—a man with no nerves, years of experience, the best connections in the business, and a real fondness for his work. The true test of Holland's mettle comes after she's shuffled onto enforced leave and realizes she's carrying something—a diskette full of damning testimony against all the best senators—that Westbourne's killer missed. Everybody wants the diskette, and Preacher, coolly eager to kill Holland and grab the goods, will have to queue up with Holland's boss, Secret Service deputy director Arliss Johnson; her lover, Service agent Frank Suress; and madly ambitious Senator James Croft, determined to buy his way into the Cardinals, Westbourne's senatorial cabal, with the diskette's dirty linen—or use it to vault over the Cardinals into the White House. From here on in, you could probably write the story yourself: Holland goes on the run, calls people who assure her they can bring her in safely, gets betrayed, and goes on the run again, as Preacher, carefully established as a sexual sadist in addition to his other habits, strides a step behind her, repeatedly just missing her while winnowing the field of the less fortunate. But you could never write it as rapidly and efficiently as Shelby, whose narrative instincts, honed presumably by big-ticket movies, carry even the most preposterous counterplots into a current so dizzying that you'll probably finish the book in less time than it would take to see the movie. An even slicker version of The Pelican Brief, with the Senate sitting in for the Supreme Court. Paging Julia Roberts. (First printing of 250,000; film rights to Tri-Star)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-684-80177-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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