Through every twist and turn, both Akunin and his hero maintain an imperturbable decorum that makes this the most...
Readers who think State Counsellor Erast Petrovich Fandorin has encountered every kind of criminal plot imaginable (He Lover of Death, 2010, etc.) can cheer him as he matches wits with a problem both more traditional and more modern: a cabal of up-to-the-minute terrorists in czarist Russia.
Security is tight around Adjutant Gen. Ivan Fyodorovich Khrapov’s journey to Siberia, where he’s been rusticated after ordering a teenage political activist flogged. So the code-named Green, one of the activist’s allies in the Combat Group, comes up with the novel idea of masquerading as Fandorin in order to get close enough to Khrapov during one of his few scheduled stops to assassinate him. The real Fandorin first hears about the case when he’s arrested for murder. Very quickly, however, he’s out and about, partnering with the likes of Pyotr Ivanovich Burlyaev, head of Moscow’s Department of Security, and Prince Gleb Georgievich Pozharsky, Deputy Director of the Police Department, to track down the assassin. Apart from czarist oppression, the Combat Group faces more acute problems of its own: a large sum of its operating funding has been filched, and Green and his mates need to stage a daring theft to replenish their coffers. After a pleasurable fling with Esfir Litvinova, a banker’s revolutionary daughter, Fandorin inevitably ends up in the Combat Group’s sights; just as inevitably, his supposed allies, double-crossing careerists and double-crossing traitors to a man, are a lot less reliable than he’d like.
Through every twist and turn, both Akunin and his hero maintain an imperturbable decorum that makes this the most ceremonious tale of terrorism and counterterrorism you’re ever likely to read.Pub Date: July 4, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2654-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Mysterious Press
Review Posted Online: April 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
A brilliantly imagined riff on the classic detective tale: the fifth high-energy novel in five years from the rapidly maturing prodigy whose bizarre black-comic fiction includes, most recently, Girl in Landscape (1998). Lethem’s delirious yarn about crime, pursuit, and punishment, is narrated in a unique voice by its embattled protagonist, Brooklynite (and orphan) Lionel Essrog, a.k.a. “Freakshow.” Lionel’s moniker denotes the Tourette’s syndrome that twists his speech into weird aslant approximations (his own name, for example, is apt to come out “Larval Pushbug” or “Unreliable Chessgrub”) and induces a tendency to compulsive behavior (“reaching, tapping, grabbing and kissing urges”) that makes him useful putty in the hands of Frank Minna, an enterprising hood who recruits teenagers (like Lionel) from St. Vincent’s Home for Boys, to move stolen goods and otherwise function as apprentice-criminal “Minna Men.” The daft plot—which disappears for a while somewhere around the middle of the novel—concerns Minna’s murder and Lionel’s crazily courageous search for the killer, an odyssey that brings him into increasingly dangerous contact with two elderly Italian men (“The Clients”) who have previously employed the Minna Men and now pointedly advise Lionel to abandon his quest; Frank’s not-quite-bereaved widow Julia (a tough-talking dame who seems to have dropped in from a Raymond Chandler novel) at the Zendo, a dilapidated commune where meditation and other Buddhist techniques are taught; a menacing “Polish giant”; and, on Maine’s Muscongus Island, a lobster pound and Japanese restaurant that front for a sinister Oriental conglomerate. The resulting complications are hilariously enhanced by Lionel’s “verbal Tourette’s flowering”—a barrage of sheer rhetorical invention that has tour de force written all over it; it’s an amazing stunt, and, just when you think the well is running dry, Lethem keeps on topping himself. Another terrific entertainment from Lethem, one of contemporary fiction’s most inspired risk-takers. Don’t miss this one.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-385-49183-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1999
BOOK TO SCREEN
The Reacher series gets back on its rough and rocky track with this latest companionable entry.
On his way to the West Coast, Jack Reacher takes a detour to New Hampshire to check out some family history in the 23rd book in Child's (The Midnight Line, 2017, etc.) series.
Laconia, New Hampshire, is the setting for the latest showcase for Reacher's unconscious talent for stirring up the latent murderous violence in any bucolic setting he chooses to enter. In this case, the hubbub comes in the form of a local mob family after Reacher unleashes his own form of discipline on a younger member of the clan when the beardless thug attempts to assault a waitress. Paid muscle is soon on the way north from Boston, but both Reacher and his constant readers know that kind of goon is never a match for him. And so Reacher and reader are free to ponder the puzzling story about our hero's past. It seems that there is no official record of Reacher's dad, who grew up in Laconia, but there is evidence to suggest he may have played a hand in the murder of a sociopath terrorizing the town in his day. All of this is intercut with the ordeal of a young Canadian couple driving south to New York to score some money by selling the goods they've got hidden away in a suitcase. Their car breaks down just outside a remote motel that, they gradually discover, is not as welcoming as it seems. It doesn't take long to figure out what's waiting for them there, though it takes a bit too long for Reacher's story to join theirs. Nevertheless, the tone doesn't go blooey here, as it has in some of the recent series entries, and the way everything winds up for all the participants shows a satisfying generosity of storytelling spirit.
The Reacher series gets back on its rough and rocky track with this latest companionable entry.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-399-59351-2
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2018
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