Another top-tier installment that showcases exemplary recurring characters and tech subplots.
Various organizations find that using new digital currency is a surprisingly dangerous endeavor in the 10th outing in Breakfield and Burkey’s (The Enigma Dragon, 2017, etc.) techno-thriller series.
When there’s a security breach at the Global Bank, Interpol enlists the help of the R-Group in Switzerland, which specializes in cybersecurity. But the bank also needs assistance in getting control of assorted cryptocurrencies on the market after the appearance of a brand-new digital medium of exchange. Seeking additional help, Global Bank separately contacts Petra Rancowski, descendant of one of the R-Group’s founders. Other groups want to implement the new currency, as well, including a Chinese terrorist group that goes after R-Group associate Su Lin and her husband, Andy Greenwood. Once a part of the Chinese Cyber Warfare College, Lin created a particular type of cryptocurrency code. Combat-trained Mercedes Field of the Cyber Assassins Technology Services team (prominently featured in other series installments) essentially becomes Lin’s bodyguard—and soon, she must deal with an abduction. Meanwhile, Petra; her love interest, Jacob Michaels; and R-Group hacker Quip enter the cryptocurrency war by developing their own digital product while R-Group Financial Director and Jacob’s grandfather Wolfgang Mickelowski struggles with a grave illness. Breakfield and Burkey excel at efficiently recapping earlier events and character histories while also delivering a fresh story. The pace is unremitting throughout, aided by the authors’ use of very short scenes and chapters. Wolfgang’s ailment provides this entry with some tender moments as well as a further peek into the R-Group backstory; Jacob discovers books, written by Wolfgang, that tell of the organization’s possible origin. As in preceding entries, the technological jargon is both modern and comprehensible, and the abundant humor never sidetracks the narrative; one advertisement for Petra’s new currency, for instance, is amusingly flashy: “We broker 1’s and 0’s at digital speed for peace of mind!”
Another top-tier installment that showcases exemplary recurring characters and tech subplots.Pub Date: Aug. 12, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-946858-36-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: ICABOD Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A presold prefab blockbuster, what with King's Carrie hitting the moviehouses, Salem's Lot being lensed, The Shining itself sold to Warner Bros. and tapped as a Literary Guild full selection, NAL paperback, etc. (enough activity to demand an afterlife to consummate it all).
The setting is The Overlook, a palatial resort on a Colorado mountain top, snowbound and closed down for the long, long winter. Jack Torrance, a booze-fighting English teacher with a history of violence, is hired as caretaker and, hoping to finish a five-act tragedy he's writing, brings his wife Wendy and small son Danny to the howling loneliness of the half-alive and mad palazzo. The Overlook has a gruesome past, scenes from which start popping into the present in various suites and the ballroom. At first only Danny, gifted with second sight (he's a "shiner"), can see them; then the whole family is being zapped by satanic forces. The reader needs no supersight to glimpse where the story's going as King's formula builds to a hotel reeling with horrors during Poesque New Year's Eve revelry and confetti outta nowhere....
Back-prickling indeed despite the reader's unwillingness at being mercilessly manipulated.
Pub Date: Jan. 28, 1976
ISBN: 0385121679
Page Count: 453
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1976
PERSPECTIVES
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
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
