Nazis once again make for creepy villains in Morgan’s ecstatic thriller.
Morgan’s (No End in Sight, 2012, etc.) sinuous thriller features evildoers bent on nuclear mayhem and mind control.
In Morgan’s story, a Nazi scientist succeeded in replicating his genius in the mind of another man, moving toward the creation of the perfect superman. Though the eventual product of this experiment, Siegfried Bachmeier, uses his brilliance in 1993 to discover subatomic particles and fashion an explosive device of cataclysmic strength, he gets sidetracked by the mind-altering experiments from 50 years ago. He tries to understand and recreate their workings, but the process gives his subjects (including himself) devilish headaches, though the original goal of mass hypnosis dances only a fingertip away. Meanwhile, Bachmeier’s comrades in Argentina—questing after the next thousand-year Reich but willing to settle for the presidency of Argentina—have to thwart the steady encroachment on their project by a team of ex–Navy SEALs. The bad guys have already detonated a bomb that killed more than 300,000 New Yorkers and scared the state of Israel enough for it to launch three thermonuclear strikes on Iran, whom they erroneously thought did the dirty work. Morgan has a grand time weaving complications into this tale—plots and counterplots, dashes to the edge and then retreats—as well as bringing his engineering background into the mix: micro piezoelectric crystals, “tables of blast over-pressures versus distance,” particle-beam weaponry and electroencephalography (a measurement of electric activity in the brain). While Morgan ably captures characters on the page, sometimes the sheer number of them can be overwhelming—Brandt and Bachmeier, Baumgartner and Bihari, Basima and Biggs, etc.—and the writing has its wooden moments: “ ‘Prof, I want to talk to you about me and Karl. Could we go into your office?’ They do just that and Baumgartner shuts the door,” or “Perhaps there is something in his notes. She decides to look more carefully.” But Morgan’s clear joy in steering the story around its many curves and toward its merry ending keeps the thriller fresh and dastardly, even if readers might find it difficult to keep track of it all.
Nazis once again make for creepy villains in Morgan’s ecstatic thriller.Pub Date: April 8, 2013
ISBN: 978-0983703228
Page Count: 458
Publisher: Alicalla LLC
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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