Intelligent, well-researched, and unsettling, this tale often references Yeats’ "The Second Coming" but doesn’t reach that...
A decade later, Lustbader (The Testament, 2006, etc.) reopens his study of good and evil, secret cults, and God and Lucifer’s elemental struggle for world dominion.
More underground guerrilla war than DaVinci Code conspiracy, Lustbader's latest has two premises: King Solomon’s alchemists employed Satan’s Book of Deathly Things to create golden treasures, which they thereafter infused with "a fifth element...aether...the Quintessence...the pure energy of the universe"; more critically, Lucifer, believing "God had stepped aside...ashamed of the transgressive failures of his greatest creation," intends to rule the world. Lucifer has set loose the Fallen as advance troops. Also involved are the Knights of Saint Clement of the Holy Land, whose motives and goals are nefarious, and the Gnostic Observatines, a long-ago Franciscan splinter group more interested in serving truth than pontiff. Braverman Shaw and his sister, Emma, lead the Observatines. They’re presently working from Istanbul, where Braverman will meet with Dilara, a local Observatine, who informs him he must allow her daughter, beautiful Ayla, a London barrister, to guide him into Lebanon’s Tannourine mountains. It’s there they’ll find a cave holding secrets about the Testament of Lucifer and Lucifer’s Book of Deathly Things. Who’s serving whom becomes problematic, but the world’s fate has been thrust upon Braverman, Emma, and Ayla; the Fallen resist. Character development? Not much, but there’s much minutiae about things real and imagined, like the sign of the Unholy Trinity. The narrative is complex, with everything from alchemists to a cure for blindness to Saint Bella dell’Arca, an Italian convent ruled by the Fallen where rituals are sexual.
Intelligent, well-researched, and unsettling, this tale often references Yeats’ "The Second Coming" but doesn’t reach that poem’s level of disquietude.Pub Date: May 2, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-7653-8857-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: March 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2017
A crime slowly unmasks a small town’s worth of resentment and yearning.
A hit-and-run in the Mojave Desert dismantles a family and puts a structurally elegant mystery in motion.
In her fourth book, Lalami is in thrilling command of her narrative gifts, reminding readers why The Moor’s Account (2014) was a Pulitzer finalist. Here, she begins in the voice of Nora Guerraoui, a nascent jazz composer, who recalls: "My father was killed on a spring night four years ago, while I sat in the corner booth of a new bistro in Oakland.” She was drinking champagne at the time. Nora’s old middle school band mate, Jeremy Gorecki, an Iraq War veteran beset with insomnia, narrates the next chapter. He hears about the hit-and-run as he reports to work as a deputy sheriff. The third chapter shifts to Efraín Aceves, an undocumented laborer who stops in the dark to adjust his bicycle chain and witnesses the lethal impact. Naturally, he wants no entanglement with law enforcement. With each chapter, the story baton passes seamlessly to a new or returning narrator. Readers hear from Erica Coleman, a police detective with a complacent husband and troubled son; Anderson Baker, a bowling-alley proprietor irritated over shared parking with the Guerraoui’s diner; the widowed Maryam Guerraoui; and even the deceased Driss Guerraoui. Nora’s parents fled political upheaval in Casablanca in 1981, roughly a decade before Lalami left Morocco herself. In the U.S., Maryam says, “Above all, I was surprised by the talk shows, the way Americans loved to confess on television.” The author, who holds a doctorate in linguistics, is precise with language. She notices the subtle ways that words on a diner menu become dated, a match to the décor: “The plates were gray. The water glasses were scratched. The gumball machine was empty.” Nuanced characters drive this novel, and each voice gets its variation: Efraín sarcastic, Nora often argumentative, Salma, the good Guerraoui daughter, speaks with the coiled fury of the duty-bound: “You’re never late, never sick, never rude.” The ending is a bit pat, but Lalami expertly mines an American penchant for rendering the “other.”
A crime slowly unmasks a small town’s worth of resentment and yearning.Pub Date: March 26, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5247-4715-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: Dec. 10, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2019
Detail-packed, uninhibitedly discursive, with dollops of heavy-handed humor, and set forth in the author’s usual...
Stephenson’s prodigious new yarn (after The Diamond Age, 1995, etc.) whirls from WWII cryptography and top-secret bullion shipments to a present-day quest by computer whizzes to build a data haven amid corporate shark-infested waters, by way of multiple present-tense narratives overlaid with creeping paranoia.
In 1942, phenomenally talented cryptanalyst Lawrence Waterhouse is plucked from the ruins of Pearl Harbor and posted to Bletchley Park, England, center of Allied code-breaking operations. Problem: having broken the highest German and Japanese codes, how can the Allies use the information without revealing by their actions that the codes have been broken? Enter US Marine Raider Bobby Shaftoe, specialist in cleanup details, statistical adjustments, and dirty jobs. In the present, meanwhile, Waterhouse’s grandson, the computer-encryption whiz Randy, tries to set up a data haven in Southeast Asia, one secure from corporate rivals, nosy governments, and inquisitive intelligence services. He teams up with Shaftoe’s stunning granddaughter, Amy, while pondering mysterious, e-mails from root@eruditorum.org, who’s developed a weird but effective encoding algorithm. Everything, of course, eventually links together. During WWII, Waterhouse and Shaftoe investigate a wrecked U-boat, discovering a consignment of Chinese gold bars, and sheets of a new, indecipherable code. Code-named Arethusa, this material ends up with Randy, presently beset by enemies like his sometime backer, The Dentist. He finds himself in a Filipino jail accused of drug smuggling, along with Shaftoe’s old associate, Enoch Root (root@eruditorum.org!). Since his jailers give him his laptop back, he knows someone’s listening. So he uses his computing skills to confuse the eavesdroppers, decodes Arethusa, and learns the location of a huge hoard of gold looted from Asia by the Japanese.
Detail-packed, uninhibitedly discursive, with dollops of heavy-handed humor, and set forth in the author’s usual vainglorious style; still, there’s surprisingly little actual plot. And the huge chunks of baldly technical material might fascinate NSA chiefs, computer nerds, and budding entrepreneurs, but ordinary readers are likely to balk: showtime, with lumps.Pub Date: May 4, 1999
ISBN: 0-380-97346-4
Page Count: 928
Publisher: Avon/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1999
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