Colombian druglords try to ship a billion in cash from Las Vegas to Mexico. The CIA, DEA, and FBI deploy dozens, spend millions, and launch the very latest in superspy ultralight planes to keep the money at home and teach the bad guys a lesson. Ing took technothrills to the tropics previously in The Ransom of Black Stealth One (1989). The technogizmo this time is Nemesis, a featherweight spy plane commissioned by the Coast Guard, capable of coasting on station miles above the earth for weeks at a time to keep an eye on the drug trade. Loaded with exceptionally keen-eyed TV cameras, computer-generated maps, and all the comforts of home, Nemesis is just one in Ing's enormous cast of characters that also includes confused vacationers, tiny pilots, FBI agents disguised in double- knit and drag, a Mormon archaeologist with an Indiana Jones complex, mystical Indians, and Peru's Shining Path guerrillas. All these interesting people and gadgets come together when the Colombian druglords—who have moved their operations to southern Mexico, taking with them the mad mountain Maoists—seek to solve their cash-flow problems by stuffing a billion in ill-gotten American gains in an ancient propjet. The plane is to be camouflaged with a load of unwitting Americans expecting a free flight to look at Mexican condos. American intelligence, however, is onto the plan from the beginning and implements a sting to divert the loot and thwack the Colombians where they live. The extraordinarily complex plan requires a stunt-double propjet, two of the wonderful spy planes, and the cooperation of a few culturally pre-Colombian Mayans. The enormous cast can be confusing, and the setup takes extraordinarily long—but the tone is light, the gimmickry supports the fun, and the chase, when it comes, is a ripsnorter.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1991
ISBN: 0-312-85105-7
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1991
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
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