More wild, violent adventures in the world of international espionage.
In the fifth installment of the Spies Lie series, former covert operative Cassandra Sashakovich is finally ready to settle down with her family, though a plot to start World War III threatens to pull her back into danger.
At the conclusion of the fourth installment, GrayNet (2014), Cassie had barely survived being shot by an assassin determined to collect a bounty placed on her head. As she recovers both physically and mentally, Cassie, her boyfriend, Lee, and their adopted teenage daughter, Ann, plan for a new life in a new city under new identities. Hopefully, none of their old enemies—many of whom are still hungry for revenge—will find them. Cassie decides to sell her consulting agency, The Swiftshadow Group, to the Israeli mercenary Avram Shimmel and to finally put her obsession with great food to good use by opening a restaurant. Yet an obstacle arrives in the form of Amos Mastoff, the U.S. vice president who becomes president when the president-elect is assassinated the day after the election. Mastoff plans to make Christianity the sole religion in the world by wiping out Israel and the rest of the Middle East via a few well-placed suitcase nukes obtained from a Russian arms dealer. The Swiftshadow Group must utilize all of their very special skills to stop Mastoff and his cronies before they wipe out half the world. To do that, they need Cassie’s talents as a hacker. Author Kane shows no sign of running out of wild plot twists and corrupt figures out to destroy Cassie, not to mention the world. Eagle-eyed readers might spot one or two inconsistencies from the previous books, but for the most part, readers will be swept away on the tidal wave of sexy, espionage-laced prose. Ann, Cassie’s teenage daughter, remains the weak link among the large ensemble of colorful and incredibly damaged characters; she has her adopted mom’s knacks for hacking and wild sex but none of the charisma that makes the audience root for Cassie. However, Ann’s unfortunate presence is pleasantly counterbalanced by the reappearances of some seemingly forgotten central characters from the pre-Cassie books in the series.
More wild, violent adventures in the world of international espionage.Pub Date: June 25, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-9862321-2-1
Page Count: 316
Publisher: The Swiftshadow Group
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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