Readers surviving the gratuitously glam thrills may well agree with Jack’s demurral: “Not that this has anything to do with...
A storied real-life crime leaps out of yesterday’s headlines to throw Boston Record reporter Jack Flynn (The Nominee, 2002, etc.) and those around him into danger.
Thirteen years after thieves looted the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and made off with 11 paintings valued at $30 million (all a matter of historical record so far), government lawyer Hilary Kane, whose fiancé’s pat infidelity has already ruined her day, emerges from an impromptu tryst with Mayor Daniel Harkins with more than a glow. Files she’s accidentally discovered on Harkins’s computer link his son Toby, a notorious mobster, to the heist and to His Honor, who continues to maintain for the record that he hasn’t seen his son in ten years. When Jack, acting on a tip from a shadowy yet famous FBI agent who’s somehow come into possession of the secret, publishes an article that connects the dots, somebody exes out Hilary in record time. Overcome with remorse—perhaps intensified because his main squeeze, New York Times reporter Elizabeth Riggs, has just announced both her pregnancy and her departure from his life—Jack vows to get the whole story, even though (a) his best lead, Hilary’s grief-stricken sister Maggie, wants nothing to do with him, and (b) the whole story is pretty obvious already. Fortified by his heroic determination, Jack steps out of his Clark Kent job into a hyperspace most closely associated with James Bond, rich in pointless side trips to the Eternal City and the City of Light and with dead lovelies replaced like soiled dinner plates by spare lovelies, all adorned with similes as well-worn, as Jack might say, as Dean Martin’s taste for whiskey. It’s all as predictably overscaled, and as synthetically exciting, as a summer movie.
Readers surviving the gratuitously glam thrills may well agree with Jack’s demurral: “Not that this has anything to do with the price of Spam in Kuwait.”Pub Date: Jan. 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-7434-6366-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2003
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
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