A bracing terrorism tale with a pace that neither falters nor meanders thanks to direct and zealous characters.
Former Mossad agents reunite to track down the culprits responsible for bombing a Syrian hospital in this political thriller.
Lt. Jesse Plotnick is the drone pilot for a U.S. operation, with the target somewhere in Aleppo. Helming the controls in Nevada, Jesse witnesses his screen inexplicably go black. Lt. Col. Bill Johnson quickly aborts the mission and orders the drone destroyed. But it’s too late: The drone fires a Hellfire missile at an Aleppo hospital. Eyewitness accounts and salvaged pieces of the drone point the blame at the U.S. for the resultant deaths, which is all part of someone’s plan to discredit America. Jesse, meanwhile, is the Pentagon’s scapegoat. Fortunately, he has help from his Washington, D.C., lawyer father, Mark, a former Mossad agent with Israeli and U.S. dual citizenship. One of Mark’s clients is Coryell Electronics, the drone manufacturer, which sets out to prove that a hacker may have been behind its product’s alleged malfunction. Mark teams up with Saul Shalach, a colleague from his Mossad days, to clear Jesse’s name by finding the hospital bomber. Enigmatic assassin Janbiya may want the same thing. After his recent mission (killing a terrorist linked to the bombing), his goal of quitting his lethal job is foiled by some loved ones’ deaths via a deliberate explosion. Janbiya believes whoever hired him had plotted his demise but missed, giving him the same target as Mark. Getting answers will require violence, intimidation, and a bit of political savvy, which Mark’s Pentagon cohort Secretary of Defense Amanda Courtright has in spades. Doucette’s (Stealing Fire, 2016, etc.) novel is populated by characters with intricate backstories. Janbiya’s identity, for example, is ultimately revealed; he has ties to two brothers who, after the devastating loss of their parents, seek vengeance against Iraqi military officials and politicians. There’s a connection between the assassin and Mark as well. Despite the dense histories, the tale establishes a brisk momentum with relatively brief details and succinct chapters. Shorter descriptions, however, don’t shortchange the narrative. It’s abundantly clear, for one, that Shorty Coryell is exasperated by Mark’s not immediately comprehending drone frequencies when the author offers this concise line: “Shorty exhaled and looked at Mark.” But female characters are less significant than the males; the wives of both Mark and Janbiya are mostly representative of the men’s choice to leave potential dangers behind and be with family. Amanda is an outstanding exception. She practically takes over the lead in the final act, as pinpointing the villains involves political zigzagging with other countries, including Russia and China. It’s perhaps not surprising that physical confrontations are an eventual necessity, but the tale is never remotely bloody or explicit. At the crux of the book are the weapons and those wielding them. The assassin for hire and Jesse are essentially those weapons, at the mercy of the people trying to control them. This seemingly endless struggle—Mark, Amanda, and others contending with bad guys draped in anonymity—makes for an entertaining story bubbling with exhilaration and intensity.
A bracing terrorism tale with a pace that neither falters nor meanders thanks to direct and zealous characters.Pub Date: Jan. 12, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-977743-94-7
Page Count: 238
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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