Thriller veteran Thomas (Playing with Cobras, 1993, etc.) returns, this time with a Gorky Park wannabe that forgot a basic tenet of the genre: provide numerous twists and turns, yes, but keep it relatively simple. Vorontsyev, chief of detectives in a Siberian gas-field town, is called to investigate the murder of an American businessman. The Russian's sometime nemesis is a GRU colonel who, citing reasons of state security, soon takes over the case—much to Vorontsyev's relief. He's busy enough trying to uphold the laws and stay honest while living and working in a boomtown severely corrupted by foreign investment and influences. But a drug-smuggling racket that Vorontsyev is trying to crack keeps leading him back to the dead American. He later uncovers disturbing connections between the murder and Iranian Intelligence, missing Russian nuclear scientists, local gangsters, and an American gas company. All of which Thomas handles with some skill, especially his depiction of a Russian struggling with capitalism's uglier side. Enter ex-CIA agent John Lock to muck things up. His and Vorontsyev's stories are interspersed for the first two-thirds of the book, and the novel becomes sluggish whenever Lock appears. In the US, Lock's sister and her husband are murdered, and Lock accumulates the expected body count searching for their killers. Along the way, he also discovers that his dead brother-in-law's gas company (operating in Vorontsyev's town) is linked to heroin running, bad guys left over from the Vietnam War, mujahadeen rebels, the KGB, and—why not?— the CIA. Once in Russia (to kill the man who ordered his sister's death), Lock joins up with Vorontsyev, and together they stumble to an improbable ending. Throughout, the action slows when Lock's on the job, and scenes sputter and balk before rolling into the ditch. Riveting while the focus is on Vorontsyev, but a real trudge whenever Lock turns up. This Yankee should have stayed home—if not out of the novel altogether.
Pub Date: May 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-06-017956-2
Page Count: 384
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1995
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
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
© 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.
