An astutely conveyed and genuinely engrossing story weighed down by too many details about a complex business deal.
In this financial thriller, a Vancouver banker inadvertently stumbles into the cross hairs of a Chinese criminal empire.
Neil Mohle serves as the principal banker on a massive business deal that connects a Vancouver company, Woodstock LNG, with “Chinese state-owned offshore energy group partners” to build a liquefied natural gas plant in British Columbia. The complicated arrangement is nearly derailed by a government demand for local equity, but a Vancouver firm, Monger Capital, offers to help without any board representation in exchange. But Neil struggles to vet Monger Capital, which has largely flown under the radar of regulatory attention. A fateful conversation changes all that as well as his life. His wife, Vivian, overhears an exchange in her salon in which she learns that her client Kitty Lee is the daughter of billionaire Quon Jin Hu. He owns a considerable stake in Monger Capital and turns out to be the infamous Komodo, the head of a shadowy Chinese criminal organization. When the notoriously secretive Quon discovers his daughter’s indiscretion, he puts contracts out on both Neil’s and Vivian’s lives, and they are forced to disappear to survive. Meanwhile, Hayden Jones, an officer with the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, works his way into the “inner circle” of British Columbia Premier Dana Holmes, investigating Chinese money laundering. His mission takes a new turn when the Mohles become targets for assassination. Bentley (The Bermuda Key, 2015, etc.) meticulously weaves an impressively intricate plot brimming with nuance and intelligence. In addition, the story is as clever as it is suspenseful—the author intriguingly demonstrates the way in which a causal conversation can have profoundly fateful ramifications. But he lingers far too long—and with microscopic specificity—on the minute details of the financial agreement that sets the whole tale in motion. Readers can’t help but feel at times that they are passive witnesses to a very long board meeting. For those who find the machinations of such transactions captivating, or at least can muster some measure of tolerance for them, their patience will be well rewarded by an otherwise gripping tale.
An astutely conveyed and genuinely engrossing story weighed down by too many details about a complex business deal.Pub Date: April 30, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5255-4859-8
Page Count: 330
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: July 10, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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