Pleasantly fast and polished, in the John Sandford style. More Rain predicted.
Rich atmosphere and believable politics in a distinguished debut thriller.
John Rain is a half-American, half-Japanese hit-man for unseen masters in Tokyo, where he passes for a native, though he knows he’ll never completely belong. He has gotten rich by providing elegant eliminations of problem individuals for well-heeled, anonymous purchasers of his “consulting” service. The cold-bloodedness required for this chilling career comes from some very nasty experiences as a member of an American dirty-deeds outfit in Vietnam and from his childhood as an outsider, first in his father’s Japan and then in his mother’s America. Not that he’s a complete monster—he won’t kill children or women—but he’s not particularly interested in the why or who of his contractors or victims. But then the technically satisfying murder (by remote control fritzing of his pacemaker in a subway car) of a ruling party bureaucrat begins to undo Rain’s cool. First, the still-warm corpse of the bureaucrat gets frisked by a Westerner who pops up in the crowded subway car, and then it seems that Rain himself may be the object of a search. Working with his techie pal Harry, Rain follows threads leading to beautiful pianist Midori Kawamura, daughter of the guy he just killed. Sucked in both by her looks and her Julliard-honed jazz skills, Rain befriends Midori, who has no idea he did in Dad but who begins to wonder just what he’s about when he bursts into her building to rescue her from intruders when he should have been on his way home. The intruders, the Westerner on the subway, and many others are all after a disk full of political corruption revelations that Midori’s father was about to pass to the press just before Rain pulled the switch on his ticker. Rain’s black belt comes in exceedingly handy many times before the disk slots into the proper drive.
Pleasantly fast and polished, in the John Sandford style. More Rain predicted.Pub Date: July 22, 2002
ISBN: 0-399-14910-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.
“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-55634-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
PROFILES
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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