The author keeps the action flowing and delivers enough clever twists to make this an enjoyable read for thriller fans,...
A thriller, set in the world of high-stakes finance, involves a ruthless trader who targets a government employee.
In Brandon’s (Death Mountain, 2015, etc.) first non-Western novel, Scott Quinn is a commodity trader haunted by his father’s failures in the market. Quinn crosses paths with Lauren Chandler, an attractive Department of Agriculture employee, and asks her out for a drink. She tells him to meet her after work at a restaurant named Henry’s. Soon, Chandler finds herself involved in a treacherous plot when she overhears Deputy Secretary Hayden Benson passing inside information about soybeans to Victor Merrick. Merrick turns out to be a cunning trader willing to blackmail and murder his way to a fortune. Benson discovers that Chandler overheard his call, and she immediately flees the office. He tells Merrick, and from that moment on, Chandler is in danger, just a few chapters in. She drives to her apartment complex and spots two sinister-looking strangers who turn out to be hit men. Terrified, she manages to meet Quinn at Henry’s and tells him: “I overheard something at work that I wasn’t supposed to hear, and now, they’re trying to kill me.” The two armed assassins appear at the restaurant and Quinn tells Chandler to run. Most of the book is devoted to the chase, and Brandon does a good job pacing the action and heightening the suspense for the most part. The author, a former commodity broker who now owns a company that specializes in virus and malware removal, puts both of those bodies of knowledge to work in thinking of a clever way to defeat the different levels of security the Department of Agriculture might employ to protect commodity reports. But there are times, especially in a sequence in which Chandler joins Quinn on the trading floor, when the tale devolves into a tutorial on how the system operates. That’s understandable, because there is a lot the reader needs to know about the market to understand the intricacies of Merrick’s scam. But the rest of the book is snappy enough that the explanations can drag in parts. Quinn, Merrick, and even a hit man named Cade are well-drawn characters, but Chandler too often seems a caricature of the helpless damsel in distress.
The author keeps the action flowing and delivers enough clever twists to make this an enjoyable read for thriller fans, especially those who want to learn about the world of trading.Pub Date: Sept. 27, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-692-51162-6
Page Count: 367
Publisher: Bright Eagle Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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