Cliché-ridden and overheated, but saved by menacing deep-Beltway insider gossip, suggesting that there might be still more...
Dalton debuts with an action-filled mean-streeter set in Nixon-era Washington, D.C.: a gung-ho cop, an Ollie North–like Marine, and a thoughtful senatorial aide discover a scam that might have helped bring on the president’s resignation.
It’s 1968, and John Quinn, an idealistic lad from northern Ohio, can’t get a cop’s job anywhere but D.C., where he’s baptized by fire in the riots after the assassination of Martin Luther King. Asked by friends back home to find out what happened to a small-town beauty, Quinn traces her to a lonely house out in Prince Georges County, where he discovers the young woman’s remains in the kitchen garbage disposal. Quinn declares war on sleazy local mobster Joe Nezneck’s prostitution ring but runs afoul of the cops whom Nezneck has paid off. Meanwhile, Marine Captain Nathan Holloway is made an aide to Henry Kissinger, with orders to report everything he sees to the Pentagon. While poking around classified documents, he is first befriended, then almost framed, by the shadowy CIA operative Bill Penzler. Back on the streets, Quinn falls in love with Lorri, a part-time stewardess who, improbably, is also part of Nezneck’s harem. Quinn also learns that Nezneck isn’t just a pimp for men at the upper echelons of government, but before he can find out Nezneck’s game, the White House plumbers are caught at the Watergate and Vaughn Connor, aide for an influential liberal senator investigating the crime, wonders what evil could lurk in the heart of the White House. Quinn, Holloway, and Vaughn eventually meet, uncover a nasty scam involving the vice president and the CIA that has a greater potential for damage than anything on Nixon’s tapes. Dalton, a Watergate-era senatorial aide, ends by juxtaposing a shootout on a lonely road with a tearful Nixon announcing his resignation.
Cliché-ridden and overheated, but saved by menacing deep-Beltway insider gossip, suggesting that there might be still more to the dark deeds inside the Nixon White House.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-312-87643-2
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2000
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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