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
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
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
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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