A briskly paced thriller that deftly imagines a nightmare scenario.
A debut political thriller that pits Israeli and U.S. military forces against an Iranian government on the verge of obtaining a nuclear weapon.
As the United States attempts to neutralize Iran’s march toward nuclear capability with economic sanctions and diplomacy, a battle-hardened Israeli government takes a more aggressive tactical approach. It deploys a devastating computer virus, assassinates key Iranian nuclear scientists, and prepares to relocate its top source of insider intelligence, Dr. Ali Bagheri Kani, the deputy secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, to Israel by staging a fake assassination. The operation is conducted by an elite Israeli unit, the Sayeret Matkal, which answers to Gen. Tamir Pardo, the head of the Israeli intelligence agency, Mossad. American Col. Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson is recruited to join the team; he’s a decorated Special Forces soldier attached to the CIA who has a doctorate in Persian studies. After Bagheri is successfully extricated from Iran, he confirms the Israelis’ worst fears: Iran is considerably closer to a nuclear weapon than they thought. Israeli authorities decide to stage a daring attack on several Iranian nuclear facilities, and alert the United States so that its Navy can prepare for battle in the Strait of Hormuz. Meanwhile, the Iranians, who’ve prepared for years for such an eventuality, initiate a bold response, designed to exploit America’s domestic vulnerabilities. Author Carlson’s plotline is as chilling as it is gripping; his brand of cynical realism has a level of plausibility that’s both impressive and disturbing. There’s no shortage of skillfully rendered military action, and Carlson’s meticulous research into the military and political aspects of his subject matter is extraordinary. Jackson, as a character, sometimes seems overly picturesque: he’s handsome, athletically fit, endlessly brave, charming, hyper-educated—and still impossibly modest, despite it all. One of the highlights of the novel, though, is its depiction of the Iranian side, as it ably articulates their zealotry without robbing them of humanity. For example, Carlson pithily captures the moral psychology of an Iranian colonel: “He was not a killer, as such, and did not enjoy killing merely for the sake of killing. No, Rafsanjani wanted to punish America as a whole.” This is an exciting debut effort that’s certain to interest readers with a taste for contemporary political intrigue.
A briskly paced thriller that deftly imagines a nightmare scenario.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-0-9982594-9-9
Page Count: -
Publisher: Dog Ear Publisher
Review Posted Online: Sept. 23, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Although Heller creates with chilling efficiency the bleakness of a world largely bereft of life as we know it, he holds out...
A post-apocalyptic novel in which Hig, who only goes by this mononym, finds not only survival, but also the possibility of love.
As in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, the catastrophe that has turned the world into its cataclysmic state remains unnamed, but it involves “The Blood,” a highly virulent and contagious disease that has drastically reduced the population and has turned most of the remaining survivors into grim hangers-on, fiercely protective of their limited territory. Hig lives in an abandoned airplane hangar and keeps a 1956 Cessna, which he periodically takes out to survey the harsh and formidable landscape. While on rare occasions he spots a few Mennonites, fear of “The Blood” generally keeps people at more than arm’s length. Hig has established a defensive perimeter by a large berm, competently guarded by Bangley, a terrifying friend but exactly the kind of guy you want on your side, since he can pot intruders from hundreds of yards away, and he has plenty of firepower to do it. Haunted by a voice he heard faintly on the radio, Hig takes off one day in search of fellow survivors and comes across Pops and Cima, a father and daughter who are barely eking out a living off the land by gardening and tending a few emaciated sheep. Like Bangley, Pops is laconic and doesn’t yield much, but Hig understandably finds himself attracted to Cima, the only woman for hundreds of miles and a replacement for the ache Hig feels in having lost his pregnant wife, Melissa, years before.
Although Heller creates with chilling efficiency the bleakness of a world largely bereft of life as we know it, he holds out some hope that human relationships can be redemptive.Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-307-95994-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: July 21, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2012
Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.
Pub Date: April 5, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-41224-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
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