The author of A Dirty Distant War (1987), etc., teams up with a career soldier/spy on a thriller about a top-secret OSS effort to round up Hitler and his cronies before they can commit suicide or otherwise escape the crashing Third Reich. Inter- and intra-service rivalries provide the bulk of the infrequent tense spots in the last days of the war in Europe. Captain Dan Brooks has been ordered by the Office of Strategic Services to drop into the Austrian Alps, where it's believed the top Nazis are preparing a superbunker to defend themselves forever from the advancing Allies. Brooks's project is plagued from the get-go by the intelligence-collecting side of OSS, where an ambitious Navy officer and his team of German-American spies think themselves better suited to go after the FÅhrer, while Brooks shrugs them off and flies to France to recruit nearly 200 hundred disillusioned Wehrmacht POWs, all but one of whom want dearly to knock off the men who have ruined their beloved Vaterland. Trained and equipped to pose as German mountain troops, the agents parachute into the Austrian Alps, then settle into barns and attics belonging to the local Nazi-haters. Brooks sends out a couple of his American lieutenants in Gestapo clothes to gather intelligence, and the fake cops quickly find that, while there aren't yet any really big Nazis in town, there are some really pesky Americans, the agents Brooks tangled with in back in London, as well as Russians who have their own plans for the German leaders. Dan gets things straightened out in time for the arrival of a mysteriously and heavily bandaged fugitive and his SS bodyguards. Is the man in the mummy suit Der FÅhrer? Everything is sorted out, and justice more or less served, months later in Switzerland, where Allen Dulles makes a cameo appearance. Ponderous ``what-if?'' epic.
Pub Date: May 1, 1993
ISBN: 1-55972-168-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Birch Lane Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1993
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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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