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 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
Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.
Pub Date: April 5, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-41224-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
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