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
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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