A pleasure of swash, buckle and atmosphere, along with tidy infomercials on topics such as the poetry, theater and the...
The first of a projected five historicals from Pérez-Reverte (The Queen of the South, 2004, etc.) about the dashing fighter and gallant Alatriste.
When he’s 13, in 1620 or so, Iñigo Balboa goes to live for good with Captain Alatriste, Iñigo’s own father being dead (he’d been a comrade in arms with Alatriste) and it being Alatriste’s honor to care for the boy. Having achieved high fame as a soldier, Alatriste now earns his living as a hired killer in the dangerous streets and Byzantine politics of imperial Madrid. This doesn’t mean he’s not good, but certainly that he’s dangerous—and that his skills of stealth, cunning and swordplay bring danger to him. Take the case, for example, that comes his way right about the time young Iñigo arrives on the scene—a very remunerative matter of quietly snuffing two lone English travelers as, very late at night, they approach their destination. The deed is all but done when something about the victims—something noble—stays Alatriste’s blade as he spares the travelers and also awakens the eternal vengeance of his co-hit man, an especially blood-curdling Italian, not to mention the wrath of—yes, of the Inquisition itself, the institution, we learn, behind the attempted killing. And who were the near-victims? Well, of high rank indeed, enough so that their deaths might have altered the fate of nations—and enough so that Alatriste is now in grave danger of losing his own life as one who has foiled the high powers of oppression. How lucky that little Iñigo is in the picture, after all, not just so he can tell the story, but so that, as on one especially dark and dangerous night, he can do no less than save Alatriste’s life, ensuring that there may be new deeds aplenty in future.
A pleasure of swash, buckle and atmosphere, along with tidy infomercials on topics such as the poetry, theater and the traditions of the day.Pub Date: May 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-399-15275-X
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2005
Just the thing for readers who’d like to channel their frustration over the current geopolitical mess into the traditional...
Deaver’s latest sabbatical from his Lincoln Rhyme series (The Vanished Man, 2003, etc.) sends him back before WWII to a Day of the Jackal remake with a good-guy assassin.
Hitler may be nothing but a psychopathic freak, but Americans in high places are watching apprehensively as his plans to rearm Germany move forward under retired Col. Reinhard Ernst, his Plenipotentiary for Domestic Stability. It’s vital that Ernst, with his encyclopedic knowledge and his keen vision of a militarized Reich, be eliminated. So the Office of Naval Intelligence, backed up by the obligatory carrot from millionaire industrialist Cyrus Clayhorn and the stick from law-enforcement agencies, sends a secret weapon on the Manhattan, the ship carrying the American athletes competing in the Berlin Olympics: Paul Schumann, a button man credited with 17 gangland executions. The plan calls for Paul to meet with Reggie Morgan, the ONI officer who’ll help him get settled and provide a weapon and the inside info he’ll need for a successful hit. Even aboard the Manhattan, however, things start to go wrong, and Paul’s first meeting with Reggie ends with the shooting of a storm trooper whose death will surely bring the dread resources of the SS and the Gestapo down on them. As his mission spirals out of control and he hears Hitler’s tirelessly efficient police closing in on him, Paul finds himself leaning more and more on people like Käthe Richter, his landlady, and Otto Webber, a raffish black marketeer, and wondering whether Deaver’s well-earned reputation for boffo surprises will give him a chance to fire that rifle after all.
Just the thing for readers who’d like to channel their frustration over the current geopolitical mess into the traditional American values of cleverness, adaptability, and vigilante violence in the best of all possible causes.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-7432-2201-6
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2004
Choo has written a sumptuous garden maze of a novel that immerses readers in a complex, vanished world.
A young houseboy and a dressmaker’s apprentice get drawn into a mystery in 1930s Malaya.
It is May 1931, and 11-year-old Ren’s master, Dr. MacFarlane, is dying. Before he takes his last breath, MacFarlane gives Ren a mission: Find the doctor’s missing finger, amputated years ago and now in the possession of a friend, and bury it in his grave before the 49 days of the soul have elapsed. In another town, Ji Lin has given up dreams of university study to sew dresses during the day and work a second job in a dance hall; one evening, she is approached by a salesman who presses something into her hand during a dance: a severed finger in a glass specimen tube. By the next day, the salesman is dead—and his won’t be the last mysterious death to plague the area. Ji Lin’s search for the finger’s owner and Ren’s search for the digit itself eventually draw the two together and in the process ensnare everyone from Ji Lin’s taciturn stepbrother to Ren’s new master and his other household servants. Choo (The Ghost Bride, 2013) continues her exploration of Malayan folklore here with questions that point to the borders where the magical and the real overlap: Is someone murdering citizens of the Kinta Valley, or is it a were-tiger, a beast who wears human skin? Can spirits communicate with the living? Should superstitions—lucky numbers, rituals—govern a life? Choo weaves her research in with a feather-light touch, and readers will be so caught up in the natural and supernatural intrigue that the serious themes here about colonialism and power dynamics, about gender and class, are absorbed with equal delicacy.
Choo has written a sumptuous garden maze of a novel that immerses readers in a complex, vanished world.Pub Date: Feb. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-17545-8
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 12, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2018
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