A mighty swing, but out at home.
Zorensky’s debut is a meticulous historical novel set during the 1940 U.S. presidential campaign.
As Franklin Roosevelt begins his run for an unprecedented third term and Nazi agents prepare schemes to sway the electorate, British-American sportswriter Percy Brown finds himself caught up in a dangerous spy game. A recent recruit of British intelligence, Percy serves as liaison between the beautiful Elsa—a German-American double agent keeping tabs on dour Nazi spy Karl Mueller—and impatiently irascible SIS operative Nigel Dunderdale. But as Elsa gets closer to discovering the extent of Karl’s ties to a ring of German saboteurs, Percy gets increasingly in over his head. The care with which Zorensky painstakingly recreates the physical, cultural and political world of 1940 is plainly evident; his characters drive on the same roads, walk the same streets and visit the same sites (including a downtown Manhattan gun shop) that flesh-and-blood people of the period would have. Zorensky makes good use of historical cameos, too, peppering the text with visits from the likes of Charles Lindbergh, labor leader John L. Lewis and a few dozen professional baseball figures. Indeed, if Zorensky errs in any direction with regard to historical accuracy, it would be in making the work almost slavishly adherent to it; his plot and characters often feel yoked to the chain of factual events—including the New York World’s fair bombing and an explosion at a New Jersey powder factory—and are given too few chances to breathe on their own. Zorensky’s passion for sharing interesting details—both historical and drawn from his character’s rich back stories—is sometimes too apparent, and often results in unfortunate digressions of exposition that stop the plot cold, as characters spend whole chapters telling each other things they already know rather than cutting to the chase. A fun, melodramatic and authentic spy thriller is contained in the text, but is yet to be carved out by a final, brutal edit.
A mighty swing, but out at home.Pub Date: July 1, 2010
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Smashwords
Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A smoothly written contemporary caper paired with a murder mystery and a little meet-the-Jetsons futurism. No one does...
Written under her real name and her pseudonym, two books in one from megaselling Roberts/Robb.
Book one: Laine Tavish, gorgeous redhead and owner of a small-town antique store, isn’t about to tell the cops that she knew the old man who was hit by a car right outside her shop. Just before he took his dying breath, she recognized Willy Young, partner in crime to Big Jack O’Hara, her father. Their biggest heist: millions of dollars in hot diamonds. Her father went to prison, but not Willy, whose last words were “left it for you.” What did he leave—and where? Enter Max Gannon, insurance investigator and all-around stud, with thick, wavy, run-your-fingers-through-it hair, tawny eyes that remind Laine of a tiger, and a delicious Georgia drawl. He beds Laine pronto, and they solve the case. But some of the diamonds are still missing. . . . Book two: it’s 50 years later, and New York traffic is slower than ever: just try getting a helicab on a rainy day. But Samantha Gannon, author of a bestseller called Hot Rocks based on her grandparents’ experiences in the long-ago case, eventually makes it home from the airport to find her house-sitter Andrea dead, throat cut. Another investigation begins, spearheaded by Eve Dallas, a tough-talking but very appealing New York cop married to Roarke, a rich, eccentric genius who just barely manages to stay on the right side of the law. Is the murderer after the rest of the diamonds? And is he or she related to the master thief who betrayed Samantha’s great-grandfather? There are more burning questions, and Eve wants answers—but, first, get Central on the telelink and program the Autochef for pastrami on rye.
A smoothly written contemporary caper paired with a murder mystery and a little meet-the-Jetsons futurism. No one does Suspense Lite better than Nora.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-399-15106-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2003
A raw and incandescently written foray into fiction by one of our most gifted poets.
A young man writes a letter to his illiterate mother in an attempt to make sense of his traumatic beginnings.
When Little Dog is a child growing up in Hartford, he is asked to make a family tree. Where other children draw full green branches full of relatives, Little Dog’s branches are bare, with just five names. Born in Vietnam, Little Dog now lives with his abusive—and abused—mother and his schizophrenic grandmother. The Vietnam War casts a long shadow on his life: His mother is the child of an anonymous American soldier—his grandmother survived as a sex worker during the conflict. Without siblings, without a father, Little Dog’s loneliness is exacerbated by his otherness: He is small, poor, Asian, and queer. Much of the novel recounts his first love affair as a teen, with a “redneck” from the white part of town, as he confesses to his mother how this doomed relationship is akin to his violent childhood. In telling the stories of those who exist in the margins, Little Dog says, “I never wanted to build a ‘body of work,’ but to preserve these, our bodies, breathing and unaccounted for, inside the work.” Vuong has written one of the most lauded poetry debuts in recent memory (Night Sky with Exit Wounds, 2016), and his first foray into fiction is poetic in the deepest sense—not merely on the level of language, but in its structure and its intelligence, moving associationally from memory to memory, quoting Barthes, then rapper 50 Cent. The result is an uncategorizable hybrid of what reads like memoir, bildungsroman, and book-length poem. More important than labels, though, is the novel’s earnest and open-hearted belief in the necessity of stories and language for our survival.
A raw and incandescently written foray into fiction by one of our most gifted poets.Pub Date: June 4, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-56202-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: March 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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