A rousing and provocative political thriller, though the labyrinthine plot can make for an arduous read.
The FBI races to uncover a complex conspiracy to hijack a presidential election.
McCrone’s (Faithless Elector, 2016) second installment in the Imogen Trager series picks up where its predecessor left off: a plot to steal the presidency results in the murders of seven electors, in retribution for their refusal to change their votes, and three faithless electors, who were killed in order to silence them. After a chaotic shootout, the assistant director of the FBI languishes in a medically induced coma; professor Duncan Calder (Trager’s love interest) is badly wounded; and Thomas Kurtz, an FBI agent complicit in the conspiracy, is dead. There is powerful evidence of electoral fraud in Illinois, and it’s likely that when Congress convenes, it will deem the votes of the faithless electors illegitimate. In that case, in accordance with the 12th Amendment, a vote by the House of Representatives will select a new president and one by the Senate, a new vice president, the two possibly from different parties. Both presidential candidates—Republican James Christopher and Democrat Diane Redmond—suggest the other is culpable of fraud, and the public grows violently disillusioned by an increasingly shambolic pantomime of the democratic process. McCrone skillfully depicts a country pushed to the brink: “In this atmosphere, it was growing harder to know what was going on at all, nor what information to trust. The Constitution was straining at the seams.” Trager helps the FBI find evidence of two conspiratorial cells—one operating within the bureau and one outside of it. The acting executive assistant director of the FBI, Don Weir, worries that the agency continues to be infiltrated by moles. The author yet again deftly delivers a combination of stirring action and remarkably intricate plot entanglements. And this is a timely and intelligent commentary on the current state of electoral politics in America—a dour sense of voter disenfranchisement in response to dizzyingly ubiquitous corruption. But the plot is sometimes torpidly complex, and despite dutiful synopses of prior events regularly issued, this will be a difficult book to follow for those who haven’t read the first.
A rousing and provocative political thriller, though the labyrinthine plot can make for an arduous read.Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-692-79784-6
Page Count: 249
Publisher: Faithless Elector
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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