A revenge yarn and thriller that will have readers rolling their eyes—when they're not on the edge of their seats. Assistant US Attorney Owen Gray is not a man to trifle with. As if toting a lawyer's briefcase weren't enough of a burden, Owen also carries a considerable amount of emotional baggage. A Vietnam vet, Owen was the Marine Corp's greatest sniper, who left his namesake signature—a white origami star—next to each of his 96 kills. While this remarkable proficiency earned many honors, Owen sought to put it all behind him in exchange for something resembling a normal life. However, 20 years later, the past comes back like a crimson bolt out of the blue when some recently acquitted federal defendants are plugged in plain view of Owen and dozens of TV cameras by a mysterious sniper. After a little investigation with his NYPD buddy, Detective Pete Coates, they find no gunman, just another mysterious calling card in a red bullet casing. Obviously, someone is trying to tell Owen something. That someone is Nikolai Trusov, the former Soviet Union's answer to White Star. A veteran of several wars, most notably in Afghanistan, Trusov has not fared nearly as well as Owen. He's still got a lot on his head, including a deep bullet wound to the forehead— courtesy of a past brush with Owen back in Nam. Eventually, through a series of skillfully planned events, Trusov sets up a final showdown with Owen on the latter's rugged Idaho home turf. During this relentlessly brutal blood match, we learn a lot of things, including new uses for dying porcupines and dead hippies. But mostly, we learn that Owen can't put his past to rest until he ices the big Russkie lug. As implausible as this whole saga seems, it is carried by Thayer's (Ringer, 1988, etc.) streamlined prose and near-masterful control of detail and setting, which make this a particularly enjoyable and unpredictable read.
Pub Date: March 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-671-79814-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1995
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
An unusual and mesmerizing novel, gracefully written and deeply disturbing.
In her first novel to be published in English, South Korean writer Han divides a story about strange obsessions and metamorphosis into three parts, each with a distinct voice.
Yeong-hye and her husband drift through calm, unexceptional lives devoid of passion or anything that might disrupt their domestic routine until the day that Yeong-hye takes every piece of meat from the refrigerator, throws it away, and announces that she's become a vegetarian. Her decision is sudden and rigid, inexplicable to her family and a society where unconventional choices elicit distaste and concern that borders on fear. Yeong-hye tries to explain that she had a dream, a horrifying nightmare of bloody, intimate violence, and that's why she won't eat meat, but her husband and family remain perplexed and disturbed. As Yeong-hye sinks further into both nightmares and the conviction that she must transform herself into a different kind of being, her condition alters the lives of three members of her family—her husband, brother-in-law, and sister—forcing them to confront unsettling desires and the alarming possibility that even with the closest familiarity, people remain strangers. Each of these relatives claims a section of the novel, and each section is strikingly written, equally absorbing whether lush or emotionally bleak. The book insists on a reader’s attention, with an almost hypnotically serene atmosphere interrupted by surreal images and frighteningly recognizable moments of ordinary despair. Han writes convincingly of the disruptive power of longing and the choice to either embrace or deny it, using details that are nearly fantastical in their strangeness to cut to the heart of the very human experience of discovering that one is no longer content with life as it is.
An unusual and mesmerizing novel, gracefully written and deeply disturbing.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-553-44818-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2015
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