In a sequel of sorts to The Sovereign Order of Monte Cristo (2013), hacker extraordinaire Zaydee exacts revenge from within a federal prison after she’s falsely arrested by two corrupt FBI agents.
This bundle—composed of the previously published That Girl Started Her Own Country (2012) and its sequel, The Anonymous Girl (2013)—has the pseudonymous Holy Ghost Writer putting a twist on the vengeance of the wrongfully accused that drives Dumas’ original The Count of Monte Cristo, crossing it with elements of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy and the real-life adventures of hacker groups like Anonymous. In a shady set of circumstances that involves stock-market manipulation, FBI agents Whitehead and Binder coerce a crooked lawyer to help them entrap his client Zaydee, a descendant of the Count of Monte Cristo, Edmond Dantes, and thus heir to the tangled nexus of secret societies established in the previous book. After the agents mockingly book her under the pseudonym “Princess Jane Doe,” Zaydee decides to retain her anonymity throughout her trial and, using her nearly supernatural hacking talent to maintain contact with the world outside the federal detention center, to falsely incriminate the agents who entrapped her. She’s assisted by a colorful range of fellow inmates, including a former Soviet spy, an insurance fraudster and some practitioners of Haitian magic, as well as a besotted security guard whose uncanny resemblance to Zaydee comes in handy for the occasional sortie beyond the prison gates. Meanwhile, Zaydee’s former lover Steve Larson is on the run for an exposé he wrote on the Bilderberg Group, and Remey Sommers, a young man who’s deeply involved in the secret Skull and Bones society and heavily invested in genetic engineering, pines for the enigmatic girl who seduced him over spring break and then turned up on the front page of the Miami Herald as Princess Jane Doe. Believability and logic are in short supply, and to say that most of the plot elements are ripped from the headlines is an understatement—the narrative can feel like an entire day’s worth of CNN crawlers. The cat-and-mouse element of Zaydee’s revenge on the FBI agents goes on much too long, and though Zaydee carries off an audacious intellectual property theft that, in the real world, should indeed land her behind bars, it doesn’t occur until she’s been incarcerated for months. The sketchiness of her original arrest is an ongoing irritation that isn’t even addressed in the interminable court scenes.
A persecution fantasy for conspiracy theorists.
Pub Date: Feb. 20, 2014
ISBN: 978-1495936968
Page Count: 410
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
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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