Prolific horror writer Herbert (Portent, 1996, etc.) revives a sentimental favorite, Victor Hugo’s Quasimodo, dresses him up in a modern setting, and sends him forth as Nicholas Dismas, private investigator. Dismas was so malformed at birth—hunchback, spinal curvature, twisted and withered right leg, birdboned chest, a forehead overlapping his eyes, overlarge ears, flat nose, backhair that formed a tail between his buttocks, and so on—that his mother left the newborn monster by the trash bins behind a nun’s convent in a poorer part of London. A prologue set in Hell reveals that Dismas is actually a damned soul, a once irresistibly handsome movie star who is being given one last chance at redemption. This time around, he must live in an exemplary fashion completely at odds with his former evil ways—which he will not be allowed to remember. Thus, Nick Dismas struggles daily with God: why has he been born such a hideous monster to suffer an entire lifetime of humiliation, vilification, and punishment? (The reader knows: every card is stacked against Dismas’s atonement.) Now, he’s hired by widow Shelly Ripstone to find the bastard she bore before she married. Shelly never saw her baby, having been told by the hospital that it died almost at birth. But Louise Broomfield, a clairvoyant, has confirmed Shelly’s intuition that the child lives. Will Dismas find it for her? As birds and whisperings invade Dismas’s mind, Herbert leads his hero into ever more shocking traps while dropping in spells of garden silences under vast clear-blue skies. All clues lead to the Perfect Rest nursing home, whose care-supervisor has the same malformed body as Dismas but an inner beauty that rings bells: her name, Constance Bell (—The bells, the bells!) Midway, the gore gathers and the plot veers into The Island of Doctor Moreau territory. Even so, Nick Dismas remains one of the most tenderly drawn monsters since Hugo’s bell-ringer. ($75,000 ad/promo)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-312-87293-3
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1999
Thriller fans will delight in this latest escapade. Cussler and co-author Burcell have delivered a winner.
The 10th and latest Sam and Remi Fargo adventure (The Romanov Ransom, 2017, etc.) is a fast-paced tale that reaches back to the early days of automotive glory.
In Manchester, England, in 1906, the Gray Ghost has gone missing. That’s the Rolls-Royce prototype developed by Charles Rolls and Henry Royce, and the loss threatens to financially ruin them. They hire a detective to locate it, but he is murdered. In the present day, Sam and Remi Fargo hear about the car, which turned up after World War II but is now missing again. It's always been owned by the Payton family, which generations ago was the Oren-Payton family, and may be worth many millions of dollars. Raising the stakes even higher, the 1906 thieves may have hidden treasure inside the car, though there was no trace of it when the Gray Ghost was found after the war. But jealous modern-day cousin Arthur Oren has the car stolen and then loses track of it—has the thief he hired stolen it twice? It’s a complicated and clever plot, with Sam and Remi trying to find it for the current owner, Lord Albert Payton, Viscount Wellswick. The 1906 journal of Jonathon Payton, fifth Viscount Wellswick, provides a solid backstory. The Fargos are great series characters, whip-smart and altruistic self-made multimillionaires who can afford to take time from their charity work to dabble in dangerous adventures. Oren knows they’re involved, and he wants them both dead and the car returned. An accomplice suggests first making the Fargos destitute by freezing their bank accounts and credit cards. Then the bad guys can arrange a fake suicide. It’s fun to watch Sam and Remi get out of dicey scrapes, once by driving an Ahrens-Fox pumper fire engine out of a blazing building. Oren asks, “How hard is it to knock off two socialites?” He finds out the hard way; he should have just acquainted himself with Cussler’s series.
Thriller fans will delight in this latest escapade. Cussler and co-author Burcell have delivered a winner.Pub Date: May 29, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-7352-1873-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: April 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2018
The jaws are those of a shark which makes quick work of a pretty young woman on the Long Island shore (Amity) where the disaster is kept quiet in the (financial) interest of the town's summer rentals. This is no longer possible after the next victim—a youngster—and police chief Brody is wrongly blamed for not closing the beaches sconer. He has other troubles — namely a restless young wife who remembers better days playing country club tennis and she is not immune to a visiting ichthyologist, the only one fascinated by the local shark. The finale entails some ugly, lashing action against the big one that's been getting away and all of it is designed to jolt that maneating masculine readership who probably won't notice that it ""should of"" been better written.
Pub Date: Jan. 18, 1973
ISBN: 978-0-345-54414-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: July 2, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1973
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