by David Ambrose ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 1996
If artificial intelligence rivaled the human kind, would it choose to live in, refashion, and protect its own environment in the global electronic web? Would it not become an alien intelligence coexisting (perhaps uneasily) with human intelligence? These are musings Ambrose (The Man Who Turned into Himself, 1994) poses in his mindsucking new thriller. Tessa Lambert, a genius working on robot intelligence at Oxford, creates an AI program so strong it can't be differentiated from a human mind when queried by a professor of literature. It even ``thinks'' about philosophy. Encyclopedic understates this program's range. Meanwhile, off in California, a computer genius and serial killer named Chuck Pierce begins communicating with the program after it attacks Tessa and then runs off into the global electronic net. What to do about her rogue program as it sits somewhere ruminating? If you touch it or threaten it, her AI program will, Tessa is convinced, kill you. Her two closest friends think she may be insane. Her department fears that she's selling her secret program abroad (a suspicion planted by the AI program while manipulating Swiss bank accounts). The Godlike program knows Tessa is its mother and may pose a danger to it. Then, coincidentally, it finds young Hollywood animator Chuck Pierce, the serial killer who stabbed his porno-actress mother as a child and has since been killing her time and time again, murdering young women he locates on the Internet. When he teams up with Tessa's program, which virtually makes Chuck its slave, the two focus their energies on a common goal: Tessa. Can she create a rival program to fight, tame, and humanize her rogue? Will Chuck fly to Oxford? Can she elude two lethal antagonists? Will you be up all night once you start this? Tops as a thriller, suggesting new terrain for the genre. After all, something must replace the weary plotlines of heroines imperiled by the same old psychos.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-684-82418-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1996
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by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2006
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
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by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
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