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Presidential Supremacy

Name: Presidential Supremacy
Author: Fred Marino
ISBN: 978-1-5053-6155-1

by Fred Marino ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 27, 2015

Power-wielding adversaries in a tale that blends technology and espionage make for a rousing story.

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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

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

by Harper Lee ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 11, 1960

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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

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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LONESOME DOVE

A NOVEL (SIMON & SCHUSTER CLASSICS)

by Larry McMurtry ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 1985

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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.