Why would Bruce Willis snap this up for a million dollars? Because it feels safely familiar, with a wild hook added by Huggins, author of three action thrillers (Leviathan, etc., not reviewed) for the Christian market. Army scientist Dr. Maggie Milton (Milton, as in Paradise Lost) has created a Frankenstein supersoldier. She's taken the body of a dead soldier, named Cain, who had highly unusual genes (XYY), altered them, rebuilt him with titanium armor, and primed him with all manner of super devices, including nearly instant self-healing flesh in case of wounds, and fangs for chewing up enemy bodies to replenish his lowered RNA. Unfortunately, to do all of this she's had to inject him with a mutated strain of Marburg virus, the deadliest virus known, which, if released, could wipe out all life on Earth within weeks. What the Army doesn't know is that Satan has in fact entered their supersoldier, endowing him with a galactic hunger for evil and apocalyptic plans of his own—and suddenly he's on the loose, with his super speed and his ability to rip through steel like paper! Who can stop him? Well, polymathic Marine Colonel James L. Soloman might be able to. Retired since the death of his wife and daughter (for which he blames himself), he's kept himself in almost superhuman Spartan condition at his home in Death Valley. Soloman, recruited to cancel out Cain quietly, tries a variety of lethal gambits to stop him, but none of them work. Cain, it turns out, is actually seeking Maggie's daughter Amy, intending to make a human sacrifice of her before unleashing the Marburg virus on mankind. Eventually, Soloman, whose plans go awry, loses the help of the intelligence forces. Cain/Satan survives all the ordnance used against him, rants in biblical fustian, and prepares Amy for his great black mass as time runs out for the human race. Staggering, galactically gruesome comic-strip, a natural for bouncing Bruce.
Pub Date: July 7, 1997
ISBN: 0-684-83403-0
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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