An entertaining series denouement that runs at full tilt.
Two newlyweds on their honeymoon, a hacker and a former Mossad assassin, learn of a potentially dangerous covert op in the 10th installment of the Spies Lie thriller series.
Stanford University senior Ann Sashakovich has just faced off against a rogue artificial intelligence, with help from the AI she and fellow students built. But now she has more pressing issues, such as choosing a career path and marrying the much older man she loves, Jon Sommers, a former Mossad operative. Amid ongoing classes and impending interviews with potential employers ranging from the CIA to Google, Ann must also persuade her adoptive parents to OK her wedding. They’re uncomfortable with the couple’s age discrepancy, and Jon is their boss at the U.N. Paramilitary Force. Then Mossad director Avram Shimmel reactivates Jon so he can help track down terrorists in Israel whose bomb killed hundreds, including Avram’s wife. Ann reluctantly agrees to accept the offer of an accompanying job as a Mossad hacker, provided she and Jon first tie the knot. Unfortunately, the newlyweds’ London honeymoon puts them somewhat near a dead drop in Scotland—blueprints for a military weapon linked to the bombing. The couple go on an Edinburgh whisky tour for intel—until someone desperate for a vital thumb drive starts knocking off tourists; honeymoon or not, Jon wants to get to the bottom of it. Kane (brAInbender, 2018, etc.) jam-packs his story with easy-to-keep-track-of characters, including returning ones such as Ann’s parents, Lee Ainsley, and the original series protagonist, Cassie Sashakovich. Moreover, narrative shifts among so many people make for brief scenes and a consistently speedy pace. The story lacks a few pertinent details: Ann and Jon’s trip from London to Edinburgh, for example, has an inexplicable 18-day gap. Still, it’s exhilarating to watch Ann’s intermittent displays of special talents, such as the ability to access the internet mentally, stemming from a prior nanodevice overdose. Although this book is said to be the last in the series, some characters’ open endings leave room for spinoffs.
An entertaining series denouement that runs at full tilt.Pub Date: Dec. 11, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-9996554-7-4
Page Count: 283
Publisher: Swiftshadow Group, Inc.
Review Posted Online: Jan. 24, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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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