In Mosquera’s debut spy thriller, an Iraq War veteran finds himself embroiled in a high-tech assassination plot.
Eric Caine wakes in the Miami Veterans Affairs hospital with no memory of where he is or how he landed in a hospital bed. He chalks it up to the post-traumatic stress disorder he’s suffered from since returning from Iraq, where he served as a pararescue jumper in the Air Force. After leaving the hospital and trying to piece together missing details, he visits a bar and ends up in a bloody brawl. A mysterious man, Antonio Montenegro, befriends Eric at the bar and helps find him a job in computer security at a large multinational corporation, Corso. After several successful months at Corso’s Miami office, Eric heads to Venezuela to tackle the company’s security problems. Upon his arrival, he meets Trishna, who soon becomes his lover. He notices that someone has attempted to hack into his computer and finds that he’s being followed, but Trishna assures him that the Venezuelan government tails all Americans. Despite growing misgivings and paranoia, Eric attends a security conference where Venezuela’s president gives the keynote speech. In a dreamlike state, Eric slips out of the conference, attacks a security guard, steals his gun and shoots the president in cold blood, causing widespread riots and damaging diplomatic relations between Venezuela and the United States. While Eric initially turns himself in, he escapes in order to discover why he assassinated the president and what he learns is chilling. Mosquera deftly captures the dreamlike states that Eric experiences. While the book is swiftly paced and exciting, some awkward phrasing and incorrect grammar distract from the otherwise engaging plot. Additionally, some of the spy and military jargon read like alphabet soup and it becomes difficult to distinguish between some of the agencies and military terms. Mosquera weaves a tale of suspense through a clandestine world, crafting an engaging read that’s not easily put down.
Pub Date: July 27, 2011
ISBN: 978-0615505442
Page Count: 346
Publisher: Oddity Media
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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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