There are surprises aplenty, but this time the ambitious scope—the anatomy of suburban vice—works against suspense; there...
How much do you trust your children, and what would you do if your efforts to keep tabs on them pushed them even further away?
Adam Baye is a good kid, but ever since he gave up hockey, the sport that seemed destined to finance his college education, his parents, a New Jersey transplant surgeon and a Manhattan lawyer, have been worried. So Mike and Tia install spyware on their son’s computer. Once they can follow his every keystroke, visit every site he has logged onto and read every e-mail he has sent and received, they quickly realize that Adam is keeping dangerous secrets from them—so dangerous, in fact, that when he goes AWOL one night and refuses to answer his cell phone, Mike snoops further, using a GPS tracking service to follow Adam to Club Jaguar, way on the other side of the tracks. For his pains, Mike gets beaten up, then pulled in by the FBI, who tell him that the club, which ostensibly provides a haven where teens can safely act out, is a cover for some major felonies. What do the Bayes’ problems have to do with the thoughtless remark with which schoolteacher Joe Lewiston ruined the life of Adam’s sister Jill’s best friend, Yasmin Novak? Or the revelation that desperately ill Lucas Loriman’s father can’t donate a kidney to his son because he’s not the boy’s father? Or the murdered Jane Doe whom Essex County Chief Investigator Loren Muse (The Woods, 2007, etc.) is trying to identify?
There are surprises aplenty, but this time the ambitious scope—the anatomy of suburban vice—works against suspense; there are just too many cutaways to other embattled characters you want to root for but can’t remember why.Pub Date: April 15, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-525-95060-8
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2008
The perfect bonbon to pick up for distraction during those long production numbers at the actual Oscars.
Think the competition among Oscar nominees is a blood sport? You have no idea.
Desperation at Dawn has snared Academy Award nominations for writer/director Peter Barrington; his wife, composer Hattie Barrington; lead actress Tessa Tweed; supporting actor Mark Weldon; and Tessa’s husband, Ben Bacchetti, who, as head of Centurion Studios, would bask in the award for best picture. Tessa’s nomination is nice for her, but it grates on Viveca Rothschild, the blonde bombshell who, determined that her own third nomination will be the charm, resolves to do whatever it takes to undermine Tessa, beginning with getting hired on Trial by Fire, Tessa’s aptly named new film, and planting snippy items about her in gossip columns. But that’s far from the biggest problem lurking beneath the tinsel. Viveca’s boyfriend, Iraq War vet Bruce, has PTSD and a much less nuanced approach than his girlfriend to stopping Tessa in her tracks. Even worse, crime boss Gino Patelli, suspecting that his uncle and predecessor, Carlo Gigante, was offed by Centurion producer Billy Barnett, hires a series of variously hapless underlings to find and kill him. As Billy tells his attorney, Peter’s father Stone Barrington, when he’s arrested for a rare murder he didn’t commit, “It seems to be open season on Billy Barnett.” But the predators’ job is considerably complicated by the fact that Billy, like Mark Weldon, is an alter ego of former CIA operative Teddy Fay, who effortlessly spots every Patelli employee early on, switches identities in a flash to escape them, and shoots them when he can’t. So the suspense in this enjoyably weightless tale is focused on the climactic Academy Award ceremonies. Who wants to bet that Tessa or Teddy will get killed or that Desperation at Dawn won’t sweep the categories in which it’s nominated?
The perfect bonbon to pick up for distraction during those long production numbers at the actual Oscars.Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-08325-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
The king of the superultramegatechnothriller returns with a 2,000,000-copy first printing, though Clancy’s labyrinthine new behemoth of demonic perils arrived too late for a full review. John Clark, the ex-Navy SEAL and master of secret operational missions from several earlier Clancy novels, including 1993’s Without Remorse, is now Rainbow Six and mastering CIA strike teams out to fight terrorists around the world. At first, an incident at a Swiss bank, the kidnaping of an international trader in Germany, and a ghastly raid on an amusement park don’t seem related. But the charged clouds of good and evil build toward a typically foreshadowed and explosive Clancy finish. Namely, a supremely powerful biotech company is led by a bonkers (yet well-spoken) environmentalist with the vision for a Project even more luminously insane than any frothy megaloid plot hatched by James Bond’s archenemy SPECTRE: a murderous ecoproject that may get underway during the Olympic games in Sydney, Australia, and involve the destruction of almost all human life, merely to insure the survival and greater safety of Nature itself. No disappointments here, but an unusually sumptuous cut of steak can’t hide the familiarity of the menu.
Pub Date: Aug. 3, 1998
ISBN: 0-399-14390-4
Page Count: 740
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1998
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