A story and protagonist shrouded in mystery run through with suspense and espionage.
In Adams’ debut techno-thriller, a cunning mathematical genius in Baltimore has to prove he’s not a mole working for North Korea by exposing the real one.
When the North Koreans take out a CIA safe house based on information they intercepted from the Presidential Secure Cell Phone, the National Security Agency immediately suspects that its employee John Nichols is somehow responsible for the breach. Nichols is the creator of the METAPHOR algorithm, a reputedly unhackable encryption designed to protect the PRESCEPH program. Actually, Nichols is a mole for the Russians, who now believe he’s passing secrets to North Korea; the Russians give him two weeks to track down the one who’s truly behind it. Nichols starts his search at Fourier, the San Diego company that developed the hardware chip for the PRESCEPH. There, he reconnects (in more ways than one) with former NSA co-worker Erica May. As a new hire, he covertly investigates Fourier and can only hope that the mole hunt doesn’t lead him to Erica. The author knows how to heighten anticipation: After Nichols’ Russian handler gives him his ultimatum, the novel skips ahead past the two-week deadline, where readers learn that Nichols has been detained and his daughter, Laura, was abducted. The plot then alternates between Nichols telling his story to Travis Jackson of the U.S. Justice Department and the days leading up to his arrest. The protagonist is delectably perplexing because it’s initially unclear (even to readers, who know more than Jackson) that Nichols genuinely isn’t under North Korea’s thumb. At the same time, Nichols is humanized by the adoration he has for Laura and flashbacks to a young Ilia (soon to be John) in Russia unwittingly enlisted by government agents. Adams enriches the story with numerous characters, including FBI agent Joe Connor, who’s monitoring Jackson’s interrogation, and the enigmatic Hank, who shadows Nichols for an unknown party and occasionally threatens the man he’s watching. There are also a few dead bodies before it’s all over as well as apt displays of Nichols’ hand-to-hand skills. Despite the technology-laden plot, Adams keeps the story relatively simple, never unnecessarily explaining how the METAPHOR algorithm operates or spending too much time establishing Nichols’ exceptional intelligence.
A story and protagonist shrouded in mystery run through with suspense and espionage.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2014
ISBN: 978-1502754592
Page Count: 322
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Steinbeck's peculiarly intense simplicity of technique is admirably displayed in this vignette — a simple, tragic tale of Mexican little people, a story retold by the pearl divers of a fishing hamlet until it has the quality of folk legend. A young couple content with the humble living allowed them by the syndicate which controls the sale of the mediocre pearls ordinarily found, find their happiness shattered when their baby boy is stung by a scorpion. They dare brave the terrors of a foreign doctor, only to be turned away when all they can offer in payment is spurned. Then comes the miracle. Kino find a great pearl. The future looks bright again. The baby is responding to the treatment his mother had given. But with the pearl, evil enters the hearts of men:- ambition beyond his station emboldens Kino to turn down the price offered by the dealers- he determines to go to the capital for a better market; the doctor, hearing of the pearl, plants the seed of doubt and superstition, endangering the child's life, so that he may get his rake-off; the neighbors and the strangers turn against Kino, burn his hut, ransack his premises, attack him in the dark — and when he kills, in defense, trail him to the mountain hiding place- and kill the child. Then- and then only- does he concede defeat. In sorrow and humility, he returns with his Juana to the ways of his people; the pearl is thrown into the sea.... A parable, this, with no attempt to add to its simple pattern.
Pub Date: Nov. 24, 1947
ISBN: 0140187383
Page Count: 132
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1947
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
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