A bold, brazen thriller with a serious commentary on the future of information.
A hardboiled techno-thriller about the trials and tribulations of the dawning information age.
Though set in the not-too-distant future of 2020, Kiser’s thriller—equal parts Crichton, Clancy and King—is spectacularly culturally prescient. Opening in the middle of a dusty blood-and-guts shootout between AK-wielding Iranians and two drastically outnumbered, but not outmanned, Navy SEALs, Kiser sets the tone early—graphic, verbose (and occasionally typographically distracting when utilizing capital letters for emphasis), violent and spiritual. Protagonist, ex-SEAL and chosen one Mitch Double Downing has discovered a way of mentally wiring into the infinity of information throughout the Web or “the grid” as it will be known in the coming years. He calls the method inSyte and with it he can access not just the transactions and rote information that floats about in the informational ether, but he can see into the souls of men throughout that much wider, more complex network called humanity. In short, he’s the perfect operative. Much of the action takes place in Florida as Downing struggles with exposing the threatening corruption of Tampa Bay’s mayor, who also happens to be the father of his love interest. The mayor and his disastrous machinations will obliterate millions of lives and Downing must walk a fine line between romantic loyalty and safeguarding the destiny of mankind. Woven throughout a story with many finely crafted twists, turns and revelations is the charismatic, mysterious, murderous Cheslov Kirill. As a classic merciless political operator, Kirill is unforgettable and chillingly, complexly rendered, especially for a man who uses a school of sharks off the Florida coast for corpse disposal. Final showdowns are a specialty in this genre and Kiser does not disappoint with his narrative’s disturbingly ambiguous final passages. There are a few awkward moments in Kiser’s otherwise powerful prose that some final polishing could easily have resolved, but the exciting mix of speculative fiction, contemporary politics and eschatological obsession amid the parochial setting of Tampa Bay make for a novel with an atmosphere and message all its own.
A bold, brazen thriller with a serious commentary on the future of information.Pub Date: June 15, 2011
ISBN: 978-0615484877
Page Count: 390
Publisher: inSyte
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
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.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
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