Paranoia powered on Ludlumite. Time for fans to refuel.
Third in the Alan Craik naval intelligence series by a pseudonymous father/son team of retired naval intelligence officers, picking up where Peacemaker (2001) left off.
In that installment, Lt. Commander Rose Siciliano (Craik’s wife) was assigned to work with “Peacemaker,” a communications satellite the Russians and Chinese believed was an instrument to guide weapons of mass destruction. Here, we learn that “Top Hook” George Shreed, a CIA case officer whose wife is dying of cancer, has been passing Peacemaker data to Red China. Shreed finds himself about to be exposed by “Anna,” a blackmailer whose dead lover left her some computer disks listing him as a double-agent. She wants $2,000,000 for her silence. To divert suspicion from himself, Shreed frames Siciliano as the Chinese leak. The mother of two, finally headed toward Houston and her dream job in astronaut training, is suddenly and damningly reassigned to a Word-Processing Center. Craik, also smeared as a security risk, finds himself yanked out of advanced CIA training and sent to a project testing a new imaging system in Trieste. There are no le Carré subtleties of spycraft here—when Craik interrupts an assassination attempt on Anna, he takes out two Serbs—and many incidents strain belief, as when the fleeing Anna dives into a Venetian canal and comes up for air in a sunken chapel, or when her stewardess roommate is murdered in her place. Shreed confesses all to his dying wife, but his devious underling Suter has bugged her hospital bed and hears everything. He’s especially interested to learn that Shreed has planted a virus that will soon empty China’s war coffers. Can Suter get his hands on those billions? Shreed’s doings lead us to the brink of war with China and an air battle over Pakistan.
Paranoia powered on Ludlumite. Time for fans to refuel.Pub Date: June 4, 2002
ISBN: 0-385-33627-6
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2002
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
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