A briskly paced but wildly unrealistic political tale.
In this novel, mercenaries seize an American senator in the Colombian jungle—and his wounded bodyguard may be his only hope for survival.
Case McIntire has an unenviable job: providing personal security for Sen. Eugene Braithwaite as he traipses recklessly through a swath of Colombian jungle controlled by heavily armed FARC revolutionaries. Braithwaite’s convoy is attacked by a group of mercenaries led by Humberto Salazar Carillo, also known as El Presidente, a death-obsessed assassin who reads Plato and Descartes when he’s not killing people for money. Braithwaite is kidnapped and whisked away from a scene littered with dead security guards, but Case miraculously survives, though he’s badly wounded. He improvises a weapon out of the detritus of mangled steel left behind by the marauders, and sets out to find Braithwaite should he remain alive. Little does Case know that the senator’s kidnapping is a carefully orchestrated ruse—his closest adviser, the nihilistically amoral Neville Horvath, arranged it all in a bid to position Braithwaite for a presidential run. Horvath convinced the Escurela de Lanceros, something akin to a Special Forces unit, to participate in the abduction, which means the Colombian government is complicit, elevating the situation to the level of a catastrophic international incident. Meanwhile, the jungle reminds Case of his service during the Vietnam War and his mistaken execution of an innocent man, a recollection that torments him in his dreams. O’Keefe’s (Dixon’s Edge, 2015) plot is skillfully designed to deliver action and thrills, and there is never a lull in the story’s frenzied pace. But that fevered pitch is eventually so relentless, it becomes the authorial equivalent of shrill, overwrought, and hyperbolic. In addition, Horvath’s kidnapping scheme is insanely implausible. As for the prose, it inhabits a peculiar space between melodramatically over the top and bloodlessly anodyne. When Case steps on a shard of glass, he mumbles: “Jesus! Thank you, God! I really needed that! Damn!” In fact, it’s astonishing how often exclamations like “Damn!” and “Uh-oh!” occur. As a result, even the surfeit of action doesn’t compensate for the novel’s featureless writing.
A briskly paced but wildly unrealistic political tale.Pub Date: Nov. 21, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5434-6546-4
Page Count: 276
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: Aug. 6, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Genetically engineered dinosaurs run amok in Crichton's new, vastly entertaining science thriller. From the introduction alone—a classically Crichton-clear discussion of the implications of biotechnological research—it's evident that the Harvard M.D. has bounced back from the science-fantasy silliness of Sphere (1987) for another taut reworking of the Frankenstein theme, as in The Andromeda Strain and The Terminal Man. Here, Dr. Frankenstein is aging billionaire John Hammond, whose monster is a manmade ecosystem based on a Costa Rican island. Designed as the world's ultimate theme park, the ecosystem boasts climate and flora of the Jurassic Age and—most spectacularly—15 varieties of dinosaurs, created by elaborate genetic engineering that Crichton explains in fascinating detail, rich with dino-lore and complete with graphics. Into the park, for a safety check before its opening, comes the novel's band of characters—who, though well drawn, double as symbolic types in this unsubtle morality play. Among them are hero Alan Grant, noble paleontologist; Hammond, venal and obsessed; amoral dino-designer Henry Wu; Hammond's two innocent grandchildren; and mathematician Ian Malcolm, who in long diatribes serves as Crichton's mouthpiece to lament the folly of science. Upon arrival, the visitors tour the park; meanwhile, an industrial spy steals some dino embryos by shutting down the island's power—and its security grid, allowing the beasts to run loose. The bulk of the remaining narrative consists of dinos—ferocious T. Rex's, voracious velociraptors, venom-spitting dilophosaurs—stalking, ripping, and eating the cast in fast, furious, and suspenseful set-pieces as the ecosystem spins apart. And can Grant prevent the dinos from escaping to the mainland to create unchecked havoc? Though intrusive, the moralizing rarely slows this tornado-paced tale, a slick package of info-thrills that's Crichton's most clever since Congo (1980)—and easily the most exciting dinosaur novel ever written. A sure-fire best-seller.
Pub Date: Nov. 7, 1990
ISBN: 0394588169
Page Count: 424
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1990
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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