Power-wielding adversaries in a tale that blends technology and espionage make for a rousing story.
In this debut political thriller, a National Security Agency analyst suspects that the villain behind a terrorist attack on American soil is someone in government—and in the U.S.
When the CIA receives a report that terrorists plan to strike on Sept. 11, the NSA sends for Signals Intelligence engineer Erick Sheppard. He oversees Operation Bloodhound, which employs technology to locate and identify threats via cellphones. Bloodhound’s launch, however, activates a program that triggers the brain’s fear center, crippling citizens with panic attacks and nervous breakdowns. This marks Erick as a possible traitor, while President David Kozar, believing Congress was a specific target, asserts total control by declaring Presidential Supremacy. Erick’s own investigation leads him to the questionable death of Henry Zhang, a neuroscientist who worked for the CIA. Venezuela gets the blame for the terrorist assault, but Erick thinks those truly responsible are a little closer to home. The novel manages suspense throughout by not withholding information and revealing the villain(s) and motives from the start. This amps up the story’s intensity: readers know that someone has incriminating evidence against a higher-up, while Erick is often unaware that he’s in the same room as a baddie. Erick, a former Army captain, does find himself dodging bullets in at least one energetic action sequence. But he’s at his best when he succumbs to his nerdiness, unmistakably spellbound when he dons a contact lens with video/audio capabilities. Marino meticulously and adroitly maps out the nefarious plan, but the tale’s latter half gets a bit prolonged and would have benefited from some editing. Kozar, for instance, gives numerous speeches and implements changes, like cutting the corporate tax rate. But the scenes are largely verbose because, with a timeline of mere months, his amendments hardly move beyond concept. Dialogue, too, is sometimes bland; a villain details the elaborate scheme and caps it with a “Very cool huh?” Nevertheless, Marino knows that a protagonist with something at stake is the most riveting kind. Erick gets his hands on a recording that incriminates a powerful someone and debates turning it over to authorities—or ensuring his safety by keeping it to himself.
Power-wielding adversaries in a tale that blends technology and espionage make for a rousing story.Pub Date: May 27, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5053-6155-1
Page Count: 524
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Dec. 15, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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