An action-packed international tale with Christian overtones and strong characters.
In this paranormal thriller, a retired military commander races to save the world.
At the outset of this sequel, the United States is in tough shape. Massive weather disasters strike with alarming regularity; unemployment remains in the double digits; inflation is rampant (a loaf of bread costs over $5); and the country faces an incredibly divisive presidential election. This gloomy state of affairs is further darkened by three deadly assaults that happen in rapid succession: U.S. ambassador and consummate Washington insider Winston Tarmac is blown up in his limousine; Saleem Nasir, the prospective chief of staff to rising Republican star and presidential candidate Thomas Maro, is incinerated in his jeep; and Rio DeLaurentis, a political activist who’s just gone viral with a video in which she berates Congress as a bunch of “moronic a-holes,” is supposedly killed when a missile takes down her private plane. Rio and her retired colonel brother, Giacomo, are the children of Paolo DeLaurentis, whose accurate visions of the future before his death fueled the first installment of DiVerniero’s (Messenger From God, 2013) series. The attempted assassination of Giacomo’s sister (readers learn immediately that she survived and is in a coma, although almost everyone in the story thinks she’s dead) propels him into a continent-hopping mission to prevent what he’s seen in a vision of his own: the assassination of the U.S. president, plunging the world into even greater chaos. The key moments of that disaster were all foreseen by Paolo before he died, and periodically throughout the gripping book those prophecies are doled out posthumously in letters he left behind for his children. These missives predict in more or less specific terms incidents that begin to combine into a Christian end times picture that will culminate with something called “the last eulogy.” “This is the time,” Giacomo explains, “when we are given the last chance to right the wrongs before darkness falls upon us.” But before such apocalyptic events begin, there’s plenty of taut, Tom Clancy-style international intrigue to unfold, involving everything from a violent militia group called the Fighters for Freedom Brigade to the villain of the previous volume, Dr. Colin Payne, whose long shadow extends over the plot of this sequel. Giacomo is DiVerniero’s main action-hero focus for the global machinations because he has those posthumous notes guiding him as well as tantalizing visions of the future. But the author is here writing at the top of his form, and the book is filled with other enjoyably realized characters, particularly the hapless and overmatched American president, Arthur Waldron; his equally harried vice president, Jerry Richardson; and Maro, the son of a Muslim woman and a Coptic Christian man. Characters are constantly getting threatening phone calls from the sinister forces lurking behind the scenes as DiVerniero expertly ratchets up the plot’s tension before the fast-paced climax.
An action-packed international tale with Christian overtones and strong characters.Pub Date: Dec. 18, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-64237-408-7
Page Count: 478
Publisher: Gatekeeper Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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