An often engaging tale of a woman who’s just as comfortable with melodrama as she is with harrowing espionage.
An attorney moonlighting as a covert agent helps a U.S. black-ops group target a powerful but diabolical organization bent on world domination in Mahler’s (Smoking Kills, 2010) thriller.
As far as Betty Thursten’s family knows, she’s an immigration lawyer in Washington, D.C. But her travels to out-of-state education conferences are typically covers for Betty to carry out assignments for clandestine agency Control. She was recruited by Tom Howell, her ex-boyfriend, who removed himself from her life for years before inexplicably returning. Betty struggles with her conflicted feelings for Tom as well as her physical attraction to fellow agent Gil Richardson. Meanwhile, there seems to be a mole intent on sabotaging Control missions as it sets its sights on the World Order Cabal, an organization that’s been around for centuries. Readers hoping for cover-to-cover espionage action, though, may be a little disappointed. Betty is unquestionably a stellar agent—a black belt in jujitsu who’s equally adept with a sniper’s rifle—but the story spends a great deal of time on events prior to her recruitment, including her relationship with Tom before he’s injured on assignment in Iraq. Mahler’s nonlinear story bounces from the present day to various flashbacks, but these energetic time jumps remain comprehensible throughout. The author also maintains a consistent level of mystery: readers eventually learn, for example, why a woman named Jil Harper is Betty’s former best friend as well as details behind the brutal murder of José Silva, Betty’s post-Tom fiance. Mahler too often lingers on Betty’s attempts to resist Gil’s physical allure—it’s perfectly clear that the two have enticing, “sculpted” bodies. But he also shows how Betty proves to be a formidable agent as she goes after significant players in the World Order Cabal. Along the way, he drops in a few good background elements, including the origins of both major spy organizations. At the same time, the story leaves some unanswered questions, such as the mole’s identity, which Mahler may be saving for a sequel.
An often engaging tale of a woman who’s just as comfortable with melodrama as she is with harrowing espionage.Pub Date: Sept. 18, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-9882628-0-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: White Bradford Publishing
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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