Another thrilling space adventure anchored by a daring duo on land and in the sky.
A global apocalypse threatens the planet and the future of humanity.
Manhattan journalist Claire McBeth and former Air Force Capt. Herc Ramond, the two comet-fighting heroes from Roland’s inaugural SF thriller, reunite to battle a devastating planetary threat. As the story resumes, Claire and Herc are joined by two other couples on a Spacerider rocket ship orbiting Earth and about to dock with the International Space Station. Together with interstellar pair Scott and Christina and the Spanish registered nurse couple Tomas and Felicia, the group’s two-year mission is meant to troubleshoot and wait out the catastrophic effects of a disastrous six-mile asteroid to hit Earth in 48 hours. Meanwhile, Herc and Claire’s archnemesis, Quinten Gnash—who feels the space station mission is useless—is vowing revenge against them while using lethal means to preserve his own safety. After a seafaring ship captain picks up signs of an approaching, deadly shockwave the Atlantic, Gnash retreats underground with two young refugee sisters. Elsewhere, people from Hawaii to Manhattan brace for the impending disaster. Millions of ordinary citizens panic, making a mad dash to stockpile resources regardless of whom they trample in the process. Privileged citizens scurry into premium underground bunker encampments provided by Texas billionaire and space tourism entrepreneur Kayode Seok. Claire and Herc strategize, but little can prepare them for the decimation of the Earth miles below the space station. While the much-foreshadowed Armageddon of tsunamis and earthquakes shakes the planet, a medical emergency forces the space station crew back down to Earth. Dispatches from the astronauts’ handwritten journals add to their perspectives, and Roland’s vivid depiction of the highs and lows and do’s and don’ts of weightless life aboard a space station are fascinating. In this entertaining installment, Roland, the author of Blinding Fear (2016), effectively tightens both plot and characterization, creating increased suspense and intrigue. Earth does not escape unscathed, though room remains for possibly another cosmic adventure starring Claire and Herc.
Another thrilling space adventure anchored by a daring duo on land and in the sky.Pub Date: July 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-07-976407-9
Page Count: 387
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
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