A brisk, often entertaining story with a tough protagonist.
In Lawrence’s (Lost in Arabia, 2017, etc.) thriller, an international arms dealer and CIA asset searches for the person who’s trying to frame him for terrorist activity.
Pat Walsh’s company, Trident, is a CIA subcontractor that supplies military goods, including weapons and ammunition, to American-allied forces. When the U.S. government suspends his contract and freezes his assets, he knows that something is very wrong, so he quickly goes into hiding and drops off the grid with his girlfriend, Diane, in tow. He contacts his friend, CIA agent Mike Guthrie, and finds out that the Joint Terrorism Task Force has issued an arrest order against him, due to a fatal ISIS bombing in Belgium that apparently used a Trident explosive. However, there’s no other evidence linking Trident to terrorists, and Pat thinks that someone, for some reason, is plotting to shut his company down. Meanwhile, readers know that a man named Michael Genovese is spearheading the frame-up. The mob-tied CEO of defense firm G3 views Pat as a threat to his illicit plan to “keep America strong” by pitting the country’s enemies against one another. Pat, armed with various weapons, surveillance equipment, and his Trident team, manages to track down the people targeting him. It’s soon clear, however, that someone else is giving intel to the bad guys—information that can only be coming from inside the CIA. Lawrence’s action-packed tale highlights a smashing hero/villain coupling. Both receive memorable introductions: Genovese is shown taking a seemingly innocuous jog, and Pat, surfing near his beach house. This laid-back setup makes later revelations about both characters all the more striking. The story has some elements of mystery (the CIA mole, for instance, isn’t immediately revealed), and the author makes sure that Pat remains a man of action throughout. Pat’s skills are both admirable and plausible; although a serious injury hardly slows him down, it still requires his attention. Unfortunately, though, none of the novel’s female characters has any real bearing on the plot—not even Diane, Pat’s ostensible “soulmate.”
A brisk, often entertaining story with a tough protagonist.Pub Date: Oct. 24, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-976063-21-3
Page Count: 230
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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