An engaging thriller with heroic and villainous characters that readers will enjoy.
A U.S. Air Force officer teams up with a reporter to recover a missing missile before someone uses it to destroy the Hoover Dam in Getze’s (Big Shoes, 2015, etc.) thriller.
Lt. Col. Maggie Black is understandably worried when a B-52 drops off the radar at the Naval Air Facility in California. The test plane had been carrying experimental weaponry that her team had designed. Later, the search-and-rescue crew finds evidence of a crash, but the weapon itself, a missile, is nowhere to be found. Asdrubal Torres, of the Cahuilla Native American tribe, witnesses the crash and believes that it’s a sign from a kachina (or spirit). He surmises where the lost weapon must have landed, and he aims to retrieve it and use it to obliterate the Hoover Dam and thus refill Lake Cahuilla, which was once a boisterous body of water. Newspaper reporter Jordan Scott, who’s doing a story on the crash and the missing missile, gets in touch with Maggie. They discover a mutual attraction as well as a chance to help each other professionally, especially after the FBI boots Maggie from the official investigation. Meanwhile, Torres, along with his psychopathic techie crony, Henry Melancon, may prove to be dangerous with or without the weapon. Getze’s tale is populated by multifaceted characters with well-developed histories. Maggie, for instance, is a former Iraq War combat pilot with a $12,000 prosthetic hand, and at one point, Jordan returns a Cahuilla water basket to the tribe only to learn that his own great-grandfather allegedly killed the puul (or shaman) who made it a century ago. Torres is a sympathetic villain who feels guided by spirits, while his compatriot, Henry, often displays his “love of physical violence.” With so much back story, Getze wisely offers a relatively simple but no less exhilarating plot. The dialogue throughout is concise and includes sparky romantic banter between Jordan and Maggie: “ ‘you know how that is, Colonel Black, right?’ Jordan said. His voice had become huskier, the eyes somehow bluer. ‘When you want something bad?’…‘Bad-ly,’ Maggie said.”
An engaging thriller with heroic and villainous characters that readers will enjoy.Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-943402-69-4
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Down & Out Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2017
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 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
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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