Bell’s protagonist holds her own in her first outing and will surely be ready for more harrowing circumstances in a...
A woman running a CIA safe house in Alaska garners unwelcome attention while trying to decipher a program written by her late software-engineer husband in this debut thriller.
It’s been several months since University of Alaska finance professor Kate Adams’ husband, Max, vanished in Singapore, only to later turn up dead from an apparent drowning. She decides to give herself closure by taking a sabbatical from the university to focus on a couple of research projects. Her CIA pal and former lover, Brad Oakley, however, has a different plan for her. They’d reunited in Washington, D.C., just prior to Max’s disappearance, and he now hopes to make Kate a CIA safe-house manager. She reluctantly agrees, mainly because the agency can provide data for her research as well as provide her with materials that were recovered during the investigation into Max’s death. She spends the bulk of her time at the somewhat isolated cabin, battling harsh weather, maintaining order (which isn’t an easy feat with some guests, including the abrasive Delgado), and tending to her vegetable garden. She finally peruses Max’s intricate computer program and links it to companies that are “major players in the financial industry” and make millions of trades daily. Then a group of mysterious men, looking for Kate, locates and attacks the safe house. Bell’s story thrives due its resolute protagonist. Although Kate rarely talks or thinks about Max (who’s more a catalyst than a character), she’s sympathetic as an introvert whose free-market stance during an economic crisis affords her few friends. Bell takes her time establishing the stellar, remote setting; indeed, Kate doesn’t delve into Max’s program until just past the story’s halfway point. She and Brad, however, stir up drama with their intimate relationship, as he visits the safe house often when dropping off guests. It soon becomes abundantly clear that someone’s spying on her at the cabin, and the intensity ramps up in the final act. nThere are also teases of potential future events, as when Kate, while ducking baddies, promises herself that she’ll someday buy and learn how to use a sniper rifle.
Bell’s protagonist holds her own in her first outing and will surely be ready for more harrowing circumstances in a potential sequel.Pub Date: June 11, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-692-71078-4
Page Count: 184
Publisher: Tolling Bell Press
Review Posted Online: June 23, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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