An impressive novel, brimming with action and history, with a lead character that has enough swagger for future adventures.
A filmmaker comes to terms with his past in Southeast Asia while battling denizens of the criminal underworld in this debut political thriller.
Video producer Christian Lindstrom has come to Vietnam to shoot tourism commercials for a high-end, Tokyo-based advertising agency. Together with Japanese-Vietnamese co-producer Nachi Tanaka and Vietnamese production assistant Hai, he scours the lush, historic environs in and around the city of Hanoi for shooting locations. Their work becomes bittersweet for Lindstrom, as he’s haunted by his memories of being an armed combat soldier on the very same streets. As the production proceeds through Ho Chi Minh City and Tan Son Nhut Air Force base, Christian’s attraction for Nachi deepens, but then she suddenly disappears in Hoi An, a port city on Vietnam’s central coast. She later appears in a ransom video on YouTube, seemingly at the mercy of two kidnappers who demand an apology from the Japanese government for a World War II massacre of thousands of the city’s citizens. The story goes viral as the clock ticks down to Nachi’s potential murder. Soon, Christian, aided by Hai and clever police investigator Bao, risks life and limb to rescue Nachi, but things take an unexpected turn, involving a vengeful Hanoi gangsters and police-protected Yakuza hit men. In a brisk succession of clipped chapters, Haggman, an advertising agency entrepreneur, incorporates vital snippets of Vietnam’s past into the framework of his novel. This sense of nuance embellishes the storyline, gives readers historical perspective, and gives the nefarious evildoers a purpose for their malevolence. The author also quickly ramps up the suspense when Nachi disappears early on. Overall, these qualities add up to a thrilling, fully immersive, and cinematic reading experience. The ominous, open-ended conclusion, meanwhile, leaves room for potential further installments.
An impressive novel, brimming with action and history, with a lead character that has enough swagger for future adventures.Pub Date: May 20, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-9973137-0-3
Page Count: 316
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
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