Not the strongest espionage tale in the series, but still an entertaining one.
In this seventh installment of the Spies Lie series, a talented young hacker seeks revenge on behalf of her dead boyfriend.
After Charlette DeSpain’s boyfriend Martin Burns is falsely accused of stealing government secrets and meets a suspicious end in prison, she devotes her entire existence to becoming an ace computer hacker and using those skills to clear his name posthumously. Frustrated by the lack of interest in her findings, “she decided to try anything she thought had a chance of working, even if there were side casualties. They all deserved to die.” When Charlette—now known as the CypherGhost—tries to hack and crash a plane containing fellow hacking genius Ann Silbey Sashakovich, Ann thwarts the attempt using her own special abilities. Despite initially being at odds, the two young women team up when the government rounds up computer hackers—black and white hats alike—and sends them to concentration camps in the West (“There are two in the Nevada desert, three in the Utah mountains, five in Wyoming, and one in northern Arizona”). But despite a steamy romance with Ann, the devious CypherGhost may not be the ally she appears to be. When Ann and the CypherGhost both swallow highly advanced nanodevices that allow them to hack from inside their own heads, the stakes quickly escalate. Kane (ProxyWar, 2016, etc.) has produced his most outlandish espionage saga yet, and while one doesn’t doubt that the purported former spy has drawn on some elements of truth for his latest book, it feels much less grounded in reality than the previous series installments. Kane’s novels are always packed with enough terrifying detail to feel at least moderately plausible, if not horrifyingly prescient, but once his all-star hacker team deviates from computers and manipulates members’ brains, things start to feel less like Robert Ludlum and more like The Matrix. Nevertheless, the colorful cast of characters remains as engaging as ever, even as the story goes increasingly off the rails.
Not the strongest espionage tale in the series, but still an entertaining one.Pub Date: Nov. 21, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-9862321-9-0
Page Count: -
Publisher: The Swift Shadow Group
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
If the elusive Pynchon regularly cranked out novels, then this latest addition to his semi-classic oeuvre would be considered an excellent, if flawed, fiction, not as demanding and complex as Gravity's Rainbow, nor as neat and clever as The Crying of Lot 49 and V. As it is, coming 17 years since the last book, it's something of a disappointment.
Yes, it's compulsively funny, full of virtuoso riffs, and trenchant in its anarcho-libertarian social commentary. But there's a missing dimension in this tale of post-Sixties malaise—a sense of characters being more than an accumulation of goofy allusions and weird behavior. And all of its winding, conspiratorially digressive plot adds up to a final moment of apparently unintentional kitsch—a limp scene reuniting a girl and her dog. Built on flashbacks to the 60's, the story reenacts in 1984 the struggles that refuse to disappear. Not politics really, but the sense of solidarity and betrayal that marks both periods for the numerous characters that wander into this fictional vortex. At the center is Frenesi (Free and Easy) Gates, who's anything but. A red-diaper baby and radical film-maker during the rebellion-charged 60's, Frenesi sold her soul to a man in uniform, the quintessential Nixon-Reagan fascist, Brock Vond, a fed whose manic pursuit of lefties and dopers finds him abusing civil rights over three decades. He's motivated not just by innate evil, but by his obsession with Frenesi, whom he sets up as a sting-operation expert protected under the Witness Protection Program. Meanwhile, the venomous Vond sees to it that Frenesi's hippie husband, Zoyd Wheeler, and her daughter, Prairie, are "disappeared" to Vineland, the northern California town where L.A. counterculturalists lick their collective wounds among the redwoods, and bemoan "the heartless power of the scabland garrison state the green free America of their childhoods even then was turning into." Brilliant digressions on Californian left-wing history, the saga of The People's Republic of Rock and Roll, a Mob wedding, and the living dead known as the Thanatoids all come bathed in the clarity of Pynchon's eye-popping language.
Pynchon's latest should prove to the legions of contemporary scribbler-fakers that it isn't enough to reproduce pop-schlock on the page, it needs to be siphoned through the kind of imaginative genius on display everywhere here.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1990
ISBN: 0141180633
Page Count: 385
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1990
PERSPECTIVES
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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