There's plenty to like in this plausible and well-written tale.
An oddly named but engaging spy thriller translated from the Swedish.
Carina Dymek is a young, midlevel civil servant for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Stockholm with the job of analyzing European Union security policies. After a meeting in Brussels, a stranger introduces himself as Jean and persuades her to accept a USB memory stick. On it, he explains, is secret information about a proposed European Intelligence Service that would create a European spy organization without the knowledge of elected public officials. Why give it to her? “You have a conscience,” he explains, asking her to read the proposal and leak its contents to the right people. Soon her troubles begin. Her bosses quickly learn that she has the memory stick. They interrogate her about it, but she doesn’t give it up, and they suspend her from her duties. She must locate the mysterious Jean to help clear her name, but that seems impossible. Meanwhile, Bente Jensen of the Swedish Security Service is investigating Carina and her Egyptian boyfriend, Jamal, who authorities believe are up to no good. Are they planning a major terrorist attack? Bente doesn’t think so, but her colleagues do. They intercept an email with an Arabic poem that says, “Their fire will loom before you, kindling desire into a raging blaze.” That sounds like a metaphor for an act of terror, and soon the chase is on to arrest Carina and Jamal. While the novel’s title comes from that quote, it misleads the reader about what the book delivers. Still, there is tension and excitement, with a plot that builds steadily. Bente and Carina are strong and sympathetic women whose interests coincide when a conspiracy unfolds. Bente delivers the best line: “If you’re going to lie then you have to do so truthfully.”
There's plenty to like in this plausible and well-written tale.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-62365-802-1
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Mobius
Review Posted Online: Oct. 6, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2014
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
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