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
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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