A lighthearted Mission Impossible for feisty senior citizens bent on social justice.
When a group of senior citizens retrofits a garbage truck to siphon millions out of a major Swedish bank, the authorities are left clueless: The League of Pensioners strikes again!
Martha and her retired friends return in this, Ingelman-Sundberg’s (The Little Old Lady Who Struck Lucky Again, 2017, etc.) third installment in the League of Pensioners series. Martha, Brains, Anna-Greta, Christina, and Rake continue scheming to raise funds to distribute to the hardworking poor and to build their dream village for retired folk. Of course, their fundraising methods remain illegal, but it's hard to blame them for targeting ageist, exorbitantly wealthy, tax-evading criminals. In addition to (somewhat smelly) millions of kroner, they have collected diamonds, jewelry, and gold bars. Eager to distribute the money to the underpaid and underappreciated, the gang opens a restaurant on a barge. Patrons are encouraged to sit at the singles table to play a dating app designed by Anna-Greta. Whether or not they find a love match, everyone leaves with a parting gift: cash. The cost of doing business, however, is outwitting local gangsters, Russian oligarchs, and Blomberg, the retired police detective who failed to nab the pensioners in Ingelman-Sundberg’s first two books. The oldsters are spry—practicing yoga and gymnastics—and sly—eluding villains at every turn with Anna-Greta's crack computer skills, Brains’ inventions, and Martha's savvy acting chops. The escapades escalate quickly to riskier, more profitable hijinks. Extortion in Sweden, stolen luxury yachts in San Tropez, money laundering in the Cayman Islands: Ingelman-Sundberg keeps the pace fast with just enough suspense—can the gang pull off this caper, too?—to make each success exhilarating. So it's easy to sympathize with Martha's burgeoning career as Miss Marple's spry, scheming, Swedish cousin. Poor Brains may never tie her down in matrimony.
A lighthearted Mission Impossible for feisty senior citizens bent on social justice.Pub Date: June 26, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-269233-7
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
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
Genetically engineered dinosaurs run amok in Crichton's new, vastly entertaining science thriller. From the introduction alone—a classically Crichton-clear discussion of the implications of biotechnological research—it's evident that the Harvard M.D. has bounced back from the science-fantasy silliness of Sphere (1987) for another taut reworking of the Frankenstein theme, as in The Andromeda Strain and The Terminal Man. Here, Dr. Frankenstein is aging billionaire John Hammond, whose monster is a manmade ecosystem based on a Costa Rican island. Designed as the world's ultimate theme park, the ecosystem boasts climate and flora of the Jurassic Age and—most spectacularly—15 varieties of dinosaurs, created by elaborate genetic engineering that Crichton explains in fascinating detail, rich with dino-lore and complete with graphics. Into the park, for a safety check before its opening, comes the novel's band of characters—who, though well drawn, double as symbolic types in this unsubtle morality play. Among them are hero Alan Grant, noble paleontologist; Hammond, venal and obsessed; amoral dino-designer Henry Wu; Hammond's two innocent grandchildren; and mathematician Ian Malcolm, who in long diatribes serves as Crichton's mouthpiece to lament the folly of science. Upon arrival, the visitors tour the park; meanwhile, an industrial spy steals some dino embryos by shutting down the island's power—and its security grid, allowing the beasts to run loose. The bulk of the remaining narrative consists of dinos—ferocious T. Rex's, voracious velociraptors, venom-spitting dilophosaurs—stalking, ripping, and eating the cast in fast, furious, and suspenseful set-pieces as the ecosystem spins apart. And can Grant prevent the dinos from escaping to the mainland to create unchecked havoc? Though intrusive, the moralizing rarely slows this tornado-paced tale, a slick package of info-thrills that's Crichton's most clever since Congo (1980)—and easily the most exciting dinosaur novel ever written. A sure-fire best-seller.
Pub Date: Nov. 7, 1990
ISBN: 0394588169
Page Count: 424
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1990
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