A thriller with a delightfully dense plot, although its protagonist has little opportunity to shine.
Well-known antiquities dealer Brian Sadler returns to help ensnare a man who may be involved in the crashes of Air Force One and Air Force Two in Thompson’s (Ghost Train: The Lost Gold of the Nazis, 2016, etc.) latest novel.
Air Force Two, with the vice president aboard, has dropped from radar. Then President Harry Harrison and others also go missing when Air Force One vanishes. The nation’s at DEFCON 1, and Speaker of the House Chambliss Parkes becomes the new acting president. After wreckage from Air Force One is found, Parkes declares the passengers from both aircraft dead from a presumed terrorist strike. The late president’s father, a former senator, asks TV personality and antiquities dealer Sadler, who knew the president well, to help find out what happened to the planes. Sadler soon agrees to perform a simple task for the CIA in London, where he meets up with Amina “Amy” Hassan, who’s on a CIA watch list along with her billionaire father, Amin. The situation is dire back in America, as Parkes barely acknowledges the Falcons of Islam, who claimed responsibility for the attack and say that they have sleeper agents in the United States. But the CIA fears that Sadler and his attorney fiancee, Nicole Farber, may be in more imminent danger, as Amin sent a killer to follow Sadler back to Dallas. Despite an early reveal of a significant player in the planes’ disappearances, the narrative retains a good deal of mystery, particularly regarding the top-secret Operation Condor. Thompson turns the spotlight on various characters, including people who are knowingly aiding the bad guys and at least one person who’s been tricked into doing so. Series regular Sadler, however, gets overshadowed in his own story, as he appears only sporadically; he’s essentially used by the CIA for his expertise and popularity, and later, as bait. Also, the book’s descriptions can be repetitive; Amy, for example, is often said to be “stunning.” However, the baddies’ plan, as well as the good guys’ strategy to fight back, are riveting, featuring varying motives and inevitable double crosses.
A thriller with a delightfully dense plot, although its protagonist has little opportunity to shine.Pub Date: June 3, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-9964671-0-0
Page Count: 302
Publisher: Asdendente Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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