A lengthy but mostly engrossing story of worldwide chaos and smaller-scale upheaval.
A U.S. Army officer at a subterranean military base is challenged by security breaches and potential refugees from aboveground disasters in Hodgson’s (By Strength and by Guile, 2016) thriller.
When higher-ups decide to move Lt. Col. Jon Frasier out of Delta Force, he earns a position at a secret underground facility called Omega 11. It’s part of Project Omega, the government’s plan to safeguard Americans in the event of nuclear war. During Frasier’s first day as ground-forces commander, he’s ambushed by a group of armed men, whom he fights off. Omega 11’s deputy commander was recently murdered, and after its commanding general suffers a suspicious heart attack, Frasier suspects that assassins have infiltrated the base, likely with inside help. He also learns that experts are predicting that an earthquake will cause California to fall into the sea, causing a tsunami that will devastate multiple countries. As Omega 11 and other sites prepare for refugees, Frasier leads the search for the assassins and moles running loose on his base. He receives assistance from Klavia, a Belgian shepherd that he helped recertify as a military working dog after its previous handler’s death in Afghanistan. One of its many skills is sniffing out explosives, which comes in handy. Hodgson effectively establishes the isolated facility, where people admire the realistic artificial sky and hear constant updates about increasingly dire global calamities, including terrorist activity and volcanoes on the verge of erupting. The characters are plentiful and distinctive, including some incompetent officers and others who are downright villainous. However, the author’s descriptions of women too often resort to superficial characteristics, such as a “pleasant chest,” “a smallish but very nice breast,” or “very feminine shaped butt and legs.” The depiction of Klavia, though, is exceptional; instances told from the dog’s perspective reveal its fierce loyalty and protectiveness; for example, it’s prone to frustration when a “female two legs” distracts its Alpha, Frasier. The ending doesn’t resolve everything, though, which leaves things open for a possible sequel.
A lengthy but mostly engrossing story of worldwide chaos and smaller-scale upheaval.Pub Date: July 17, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4575-5536-7
Page Count: 646
Publisher: Dog Ear Publishing
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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