An original, but uneven technology thriller involving murder and a mysterious manipulator.
An obsessed stalker shadows a young man as his Internet company prepares to go public in the year 2000.
Frahmann (The Finnish Girl, 2014, etc.) tells the story of Danny Lahti, an innocent young man from the small town of Thread, Wisconsin. As the novel opens on New Year’s Eve 2000, Danny is happily ensconced in Los Angeles with his older boyfriend, Josh Gunderson. They are joint partners in an Internet venture called Premios, but Danny is mostly content to leave the running of the business to Josh and his right-hand woman, Orleans. But as Josh prepares to take the company public, some strange events start to plague the couple. Someone hacks into the company’s files. There is a break-in at Josh and Danny’s California basement. And when friend and investor Chip Grant flies to LA to investigate, he mysteriously disappears and is later found dead. As Danny, with the help of Chip’s wife, Cynthia, tries to uncover the truth, he keeps running into more and more questions. Is Josh really as innocent as he claims about the financial health of the company? Why do figures from Danny’s past keep resurfacing as he investigates? And who is the enigmatic stalker who seems to be following Danny around town? Frahmann certainly weaves an original story here as he brings readers along on Danny’s journey. Yet, ultimately, the plot feels both overly complicated and a bit thin. The schemes and machinations involving Premios are a little too convoluted to follow. The revelation of Danny’s stalker is both predictable and baffling—it seems difficult to believe that one character has been following Danny and secretly meddling in his life for years. Despite consistently repeating lines like “I’ve always wanted to tear away everything until we face ourselves in abject nakedness, unable to hide behind anything but our essence,” the stalker and his actual motives remain somewhat opaque. Focusing on character development instead of shocks and thrills would have helped make the novel a bit more emotionally accessible for readers.
An original, but uneven technology thriller involving murder and a mysterious manipulator.Pub Date: Aug. 11, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-692-71057-9
Page Count: 327
Publisher: Loon Town Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 6, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
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
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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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