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
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.
Pub Date: April 5, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-41224-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
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