Sunken gold, black magic, sea monsters, a beautiful Brazilian in a bikini—what more could you want from a summer thriller?
Thrills and chills come with shipwrecked treasure as a recent college grad searches for his missing brother on the Mexican coast.
Dan Duran is traveling the world. The last postcard he sent home is four months old and his mother fears that this time, her oldest has gotten himself killed. Not an outlandish assumption—he’s already been in foreign jails for smuggling drugs and antiquities. As a favor to Mom, brother Jack and his college buddies Duff and Rock agree to look around Puerto Vallarta for Dan. What they find is a lifetime’s worth of adventure in the space of a week. After a harrowing night at a Mexican biker bar (Jack wakes to find “Yanqui Go Home” carved into his back), they follow one final lead to Dan’s last known whereabouts, the cursed village of Punta Perdida. They hitch a ride down the coast on the Obi-man, a state-of-the-art yacht manned by two gorgeous women—Eva and Candy—and owned by the mysterious Leo Bellocheque, a Bahamian businessman with an agenda of his own. In Punta Perdida, Jack finds a deaf-mute priest who has Dan’s journal and swears Dan is dead. Piecing together clues from Dan’s notes, which include a rubbing of a gold coin Bellocheque had earlier said belonged to his great-great-grandfather, Jack demands some answers. It seems Dan had contacted Bellocheque months ago, sending the gold coin as proof of his discovery of the sunken treasure of the Argonaut. A slave ship turned gold convoy, it carried the fortune of Bellocheque’s ancestor, a freed man who was swindled and enslaved by the ship’s captain. With the gold under the yacht, the group could make quick work of the retrieval except for a few deadly obstacles: a man-eating manta ray called El Diablo Blanco, the murderous, devil-worshipping residents of Punta Perdida and speed-sniffing gangsters looking for Dan’s gold. Overwriting rears its head as many times as the manta ray: “My life was to be thrown away for these cursed lumps of ore.” But never mind, it’s all part of the campy fun of the treasure hunt.
Sunken gold, black magic, sea monsters, a beautiful Brazilian in a bikini—what more could you want from a summer thriller?Pub Date: July 6, 2006
ISBN: 0-312-34373-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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