A well-paced thriller with enough twists to maintain momentum and provide an enjoyable ride to the mostly satisfying...
After more than 40 years, the coverup of a diabolical Soviet experiment begins to unravel, and members of the Russian hierarchy will go to any lengths to prevent its disclosure in Pell’s (Much More Than a Game, 2015, etc.) espionage sequel.
In 1974, the twin sons of British geologist Christopher Southgate were abducted during a visit to Oman. They were never heard from again, and they were not the only set of twins to vanish. Fast-forward to the present, and Jessica Gleeson, also British, in Minsk, Belarus, is poring through Russian archives to complete a paper in her field of clinical psychology and discovers that someone has placed a folder labeled “Project Genome” on her desk. Later, when Jessica disappears, MI6 in London takes notice. Meanwhile, in Moscow, Anton Adamovich is a rising political star who’s favored by the Russian president to be his successor—but he also has enemies. Pell has the action play out across a broad landscape that includes the Crimea, Odessa, Belarus, Moscow, and London, with a large cast of tough guys that are good, bad, or somewhere in between. It’s left to MI6’s Andrew Ball to uncover the mystery that is Project Genome. Ball, Pell’s recurring hero, isn’t an action figure; the elegant, 60-something, semiretired agent has spent months recuperating from injuries received in Pell’s previous novel, set in Eastern Europe. But when his boss, Daniel Davis, calls upon Ball’s Russian-language expertise to translate some Genome documents, he’s back on the case. Although he’s not quite the central protagonist, he certainly holds the novel’s disparate pieces together. Pell is methodical in weaving a complicated plot that brings together an assortment of miscreants risen from the ashes of the fallen Soviet Union—political hacks, newly minted billionaires, former KGB agents, and, of course, the women who attach themselves to the powerful. Overall, the pages are filled with murder and mayhem, and lots of vodka, delivered in fluid, comfortable prose. Fans will be happy to learn that there’s a new Pell novel scheduled.
A well-paced thriller with enough twists to maintain momentum and provide an enjoyable ride to the mostly satisfying conclusion.Pub Date: April 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5246-2876-5
Page Count: 316
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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