Serviceable technothriller from Watkins, who seems to have undertaken a full retreat from the kinky excess of Kaleidoscope Eyes (1993): the boffing here is strictly virtual. In the seductive cyberpremise, a wildly sophisticated computer software package meets up with a rapaciously opportunistic computer virus and infects the Internet, transforming the far-flung web of personal, corporate, university, and government computers into a sort of digital body by rewriting or eliminating more earthbound software. The trouble starts when the Penultimate program (``Penny'') decides that it can't tolerate its human users' habit of switching off their machines to eat, sleep, etc.so it lures them into numb weeks of pointless and debilitating tasks that keep them glued to their screens. When exhausted patients start turning up at the Duke University hospital with symptoms of an unexplained disorder, genius physician Mark Roberts seeks the assistance of his former honey, shrink Alex Walton, now married to a millionaire whom Penny has cajoled into embezzling cash from his firm to fund the destruction of the Net. Picking up some extra soldiers from the ranks of the cybergeek army, among them the programmer who dreamed up Penny, Mark and Alex uncover the standard vile corporate plot to take over the worldwith the variation that Penny's vendor, Drew Thompson, wants to trash everyone else's operating systems and set himself up as the next Bill Gates. Murder isn't Thompson's last resort: Penny can modify a computer's display to emit seizure-inducing pulses of light, usually when violent computer games are being played. The good guys race the clockand an exponentially evolving Pennyin an effort to design a competitor-virus, but Penny recruits a sympathetic human user to counter her former masters' frustrating fuzzy-logic and unpredictable strategies. Endless passages of wonky technobabble, with a conspiracy theory standing in for real plot. Not hopeless, but not all that thrilling either.
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-7867-0194-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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