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
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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
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