Ollie North tracking a serial killer? Not quite—but this much-hyped, portentously pseudonymous first novel reads like a vigilante wet dream crossed with a campaign bio for the would-be senator. Before he was convicted of lying to Congress about his role in the BCCI scandal, CIA stalwart Mike Culley ran KGB operative Nikolai Lubanov as an agent-in-place in Moscow. Now Lubanov has defected to the U.S., checked out of his new identity as John Malik, and hijacked a truckload of blank currency paper, obviously preparing for a major foray into counterfeiting. Culley's old CIA mates, determined to keep the scandal of a paid defector turning criminal all in the family, spring Culley from prison and set him quietly on Malik's trail. They don't tell him that the real reason they're looking for Malik (and trying to keep the hunt secret from the FBI) is that, as a break from counterfeiting, he's reverted to his first love: torturing and killing young women. When Culley finds out that the man he's hunting through Virginia and on to New Jersey and Brighton Beach is a brutal murderer, he decides he doesn't owe his old buddies a thing. Teaming up with Julie Houser, an ex-cop Washington Post reporter whose sidearms are almost as big as his, Culley resolves to take Malik on his own terms, stopping off in New York only long enough to see his touchingly supportive daughter Jenny (``You have nothing to be ashamed of. What you did had nothing to do with right and wrong.''), who just happens to be the sort of attractive young woman Malik's been seeing a lot of lately. Rabble-rousing speeches aside—the quotable bits just go on and on—a routine romp through familiar territory. Fascinatingly banal, like watching Liz Taylor guest-star on General Hospital. (First printing of 100,000; Literary Guild/Mystery Guild selections; $100,000 ad/promo)
Pub Date: Sept. 6, 1994
ISBN: 0-385-31329-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
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
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