An intriguing debut thriller from a burgeoning talent to watch.
A clever debut novel in which an engineer inadvertently helps his best friend solve an intricate FBI case.
Gardner’s thriller centers on two childhood buddies: computer engineer Barry Thomas and FBI Agent Val Scoffer. Barry just started a new job in Cleveland, where he makes fast friends at work and at his apartment complex. But, through no fault of his own, Barry just as quickly makes an enemy. A woman has been leaving increasingly angry notes to someone named Jimmy on Barry’s door. He tracks her down and tells her he doesn’t know any Jimmy. So she begins stalking him instead, both in person and on social media. In addition, he begins getting progressively sicker, and he’s afraid the woman, who works at a pharmaceutical company, has poisoned him. He becomes paranoid of everyone around him: “The police were allowing the person who had done this poisoning to slip through their fingers. The icing on the cake was his concerned neighbors turning up, obviously to assuage any suspicion and try to minimize their own involvement.” Val, based in Kansas City, is having his own problems. There is a rat within his department, and a racketeering case falls into chaos when all the electronic evidence disappears. In addition, one confidential informant is killed and another, named Jimmy, vanishes. Val suspects that a suddenly flush colleague is the rat, but he doesn’t have a plan to trap her until Barry tells him of his woes. Gardner, who spent decades in IT, uses his background to create a believable crime scenario, but he doesn’t overwhelm the reader with technical details. Gardner’s narrative is crisply paced, alternating between Barry and Val, with few quiet scenes. His conversational writing style makes for a quick, breezy read. Sympathetic characters in Barry and Val, an arrogant but realistic villain, and a large supporting cast add to the fun. It almost seems like he’s planning a series featuring all these characters, which would be welcome. He’s done some admirable groundwork in this first volume.
An intriguing debut thriller from a burgeoning talent to watch.Pub Date: June 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5446-3743-3
Page Count: 292
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: July 21, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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