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
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
