Cloak-and-dagger meets robe-and-Psalter with jokes and swagger, all just for fun.
Breezy spy spoof as members of the medieval Knights Templar have survived to modern times and find themselves in a complicated intrigue with their rivals, the Teutonic Knights, as well as with the CIA, the UN, what might be a Soviet matter-transmitter, a purloined cultic idol and a suave Manhattan Satanist who has been “excommunicated for giving evil a bad name.” As one of the 33 priests of the Knights Templar’s inner circle, Peter Crossman (man of the cross, get it?) can take confession, administer last rites, speak Latin, and do every James Bond stunt except sleep with Maggie, his beautiful partner in virtue, who happens to be a nun and trained assassin. Together with Simon, a Templar trainee uncomfortably proficient at safecracking, they’re assigned to break into a warehouse in Newark, New Jersey, and search for a bunch of UN peacekeepers who’ve been kidnapped from Jerusalem. They find a barrel of fungus so vile it sets Maggie’s rosary on fire. A Templar agent who’s supposed to explain everything winds up dead behind a Manhattan strip-club, his face sliced off. After consulting the defrocked Satanist and part-time art thief, Francis X. Dalyrmple, the trio goes back and forth across the Hudson, pursued by Teutonic Knight bad guys, CIA double agents, and a horde of stinking fungoid zombies as they locate the Baphomet, a telepathic, matter-transporting idol that might be fulfilling the prophecies presaging the apocalypse. Macdonald, co-author (with his wife, Debra Doyle) of the Mageworlds fantasy series, sweetens his farce with puns, comic asides, references to The Man from U.N.C.L.E., and, in a parallel narrative of Crossman’s earlier life as a CIA agent, wonderfully bad Hemingway (“You are such a woman and I am such a man”).
Cloak-and-dagger meets robe-and-Psalter with jokes and swagger, all just for fun.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-312-86988-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2002
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
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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