ACROBAT

Name: ACROBAT
Author: Gonzalo Lira
ISBN: 0-312-28694-5

by Gonzalo Lira ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 2001

Lira (Counterparts, 1998) is an edgy, energetic storyteller, and his spin on a well-worn genre has it frisking about almost...

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It’s not George Smiley’s kind of spycraft, but it’s complex enough and no less deadly.

Swaggering body language, hip and swingy language—color them infinitely gaudier than the usual Smiley-gray: in fact, think of the Mod Squad folded into the CIA, and perhaps a picture will start to emerge. Five youngsters—in their 20s—have been organized into a counterintelligence work group called ACROBAT for a mission that’s difficult, dangerous—and compromised almost before it gets underway. We first meet them the day after disaster is established as a condition of their lives, the day after they find themselves shunted out into the cold in a manner so brutally unexpected as to be downright Kafka-like. After a series of brilliant successes, ACROBAT has suddenly, inexplicably become anathema, the object of an all-out hunt masterminded by the redoubtable Nicholas Denton. Among the most powerful of CIA bureaucrats, Denton, as elegant as he is unprincipled, is intent on the fall of ACROBAT’s high-fliers. Why? What could have gone wrong? As in all good spy stories, the reasons are murky, calculatedly inaccessible. Has ACROBAT learned things about Denton that threaten the bubble reputation? Does Denton know things about ACROBAT—and its éminence grise Tom Carr—that discredit its very reason for being? Whichever the case, it’s clear that Denton and Carr share an aversion transcending the facts of the matter. As the ACROBAT kids twist and turn to elude the relentless Denton, they reveal themselves as a much more disparate group than they seemed at the outset, though what they have in common are courage, resourcefulness, and feelings of intense loyalty to each other. It’s their differences, however, that make them so interesting. And their fates so poignant.

Lira (Counterparts, 1998) is an edgy, energetic storyteller, and his spin on a well-worn genre has it frisking about almost as if newly minted.

Pub Date: May 1, 2001

ISBN: 0-312-28694-5

Page Count: 352

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2002

Categories:

THRILLER

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THE HIGHWAY

by C.J. Box ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 30, 2013

Box handles this foolproof formula with complete assurance, keeping the pot at a full boil until the perfunctory,...

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The creator of Wyoming Fish and Game Warden Joe Pickett (Breaking Point, 2013, etc.) works the area around Yellowstone National Park in this stand-alone about a long-haul trucker with sex and murder on his mind.

The Lizard King, as he calls himself, normally targets lot lizards—prostitutes who work the parking lots adjacent to the rest stops that dot interstate highways. But he’s more than happy to move up to a higher class of victim when he runs across the Sullivan sisters. Danielle, 18, and Gracie, 16, are supposed to be driving from their mother’s home in Denver to their father’s in Omaha, but Danielle has had the bright idea of heading instead to Bozeman, Mont., to visit her boyfriend, Justin Hoyt. Far from home, their whereabouts known to only a few people, the girls are the perfect victims even before they nearly collide with the Lizard King’s rig and Danielle flips him off. Hours later, very shortly after he’s caught up with them in the depths of Yellowstone and done his best to eradicate every trace of his abduction, Justin, worried that Danielle refused his last phone call, tells his father that something bad has happened. Cody Hoyt, an investigator for the Lewis and Clark County Sheriff’s Department, is already having a tough day: At the insistence of his crooked boss, Sheriff Tubman, his longtime student and new partner, Cassandra Dewell, has just caught him planting evidence in an unrelated murder, and he’s been suspended from his job. If he’s lost his badge, though, Cody’s got plenty of time on his hands to drive downstate and meet with State Trooper Rick Legerski, the ex-husband of his dispatcher’s sister, to talk about what to do next. And so the countdown begins.

Box handles this foolproof formula with complete assurance, keeping the pot at a full boil until the perfunctory, anticlimactic and unsatisfactory ending.

Pub Date: July 30, 2013

ISBN: 978-0-312-58320-0

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Minotaur

Review Posted Online: July 6, 2013

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2013

Categories:

THRILLER | CRIME & LEGAL THRILLER

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NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN

by Cormac McCarthy ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 25, 2005

Magnificent writing, nonetheless, makes the best case yet for putting McCarthy on a pedestal just below the one occupied by...

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Almost as frustrating as it is commanding, McCarthy’s ninth (and first since the completion of his Border Trilogy: Cities of the Plain, 1998, etc.) is a formidable display of stunningly written scenes that don’t quite cohere into a fully satisfying narrative.

It’s a bleak chronicle of murder, revenge and implacable fate pocked with numerous echoes of McCarthy’s great Blood Meridian (1985). Here, the story’s set in 1980 in southern Texas near the Mexican border, where aging Sheriff Bell, a decorated WWII veteran, broods heroically over the territory he’s sworn to protect, while—in a superb, sorrowful monologue—acknowledging the omnipresence of ineradicable evil all around him. Then the focus trains itself on Vietnam vet Llewellyn Moss, a hunter who stumbles upon several dead bodies, a stash of Mexican heroin and more than $2 million in cash that he absconds with. The tale then leaps among the hunted (Moss), an escaped killer (Anton Chigurh), whose crimes include double-crossing the drug cartel from which the money was taken, the Army Special Forces freelancer (Carson Wells) hired by druglords and—in dogged pursuit of all the horrors spawned by their several interactions—the intrepid, however flawed and guilty, stoical Sheriff Bell: perhaps the most fully human and sympathetic character McCarthy has ever created. The justly praised near-biblical style, an artful fusion of brisk declarative sentences and vivid, simple images, confers horrific intensity on the escalating violence and chaos, while precisely dramatizing the sense of nemesis that pursues and punishes McCarthy’s characters (scorpions in a sealed bottle). But this eloquent melodrama is seriously weakened by its insufficiently varied reiterated message: “if you were Satan . . . tryin to bring the human race to its knees, what you would probably come up with is narcotics.”

Magnificent writing, nonetheless, makes the best case yet for putting McCarthy on a pedestal just below the one occupied by William Faulkner.