A clever, spirited story with a brainy, nimble heroine at the helm.
A software engineer suspects the company overseeing mandatory corporate training harbors a nefarious agenda in this techno-thriller.
From the beginning, Deb Bollinger refuses to take part in Blackquest 40, the training exercise for Codewise Solutions in San Francisco. She’s far too busy, having just launched her app, Carebnb, which she designed to help homeless individuals locate the nearest available “host bed.” It’s a personal project for Deb, as she spent a homeless childhood with her mother, who eventually developed schizophrenia. But Deb isn’t able to verify Carebnb’s functionality when Elite Development, which is running Blackquest 40, blocks data and cellphone traffic. She quickly learns how serious Elite is about ensuring that everyone stays for the entirety of the exercise’s 40-hour duration. When Deb tries leaving the building, an Elite employee physically prevents her from departing. Deb is convinced her mentor, Codewise CEO Susan Wright, the person who hired her, will oppose Elite’s paramilitary techniques. Unfortunately, Susan is currently out of the country on business. On site is Carter Kotanchek, CFO and company co-founder (with Susan and Paul Gribbe), who believes Elite’s certification of Codewise will drum up much-needed revenue. But Deb has other plans: She looks for a way to bypass Elite’s cyberobstructions. But with few friends at Codewise, she’s largely on her own. Surprisingly, she finds indications that Elite is not only deceitful, but also considerably more dangerous than she initially surmised. Rather than searching for escape, Deb opts for sticking around to foil whatever sinister scheme Elite is cooking up. Many readers will spot resemblances between this book and the popular 1988 action film Die Hard. Deb, for one, is a loner in a building filled with workers who are essentially hostages, and she stealthily crawls around HVAC ducts. But Bond’s (The Winner Maker, 2018) twisty tale ultimately takes on a life of its own, especially as Deb gets closer to learning what exactly Elite is after. The novel is jampacked with coding jargon, most of which will make little or no sense to novices. Nevertheless, the tale is coherent, as it’s clear, for example, that Elite wants Codewise employees to build software on a very strict deadline. Coupled with the author’s intelligent prose is his visual storytelling: Elite employees wear yellow shirts, providing Deb (and readers) with a bright and simple way to identify villains. As a protagonist, Deb is resourceful and physically capable (in defiance of her “hundred-odd pounds”), though her loner status seems self-imposed. But she’s the first to acknowledge her flaws, and she reluctantly warms up to someone who becomes an unlikely ally. At the same time, Deb’s first-person narration is brisk, gleefully snarky, and filled with indelible metaphors. “The relief that sweeps through me is water through a burning home,” she muses, while later observing that a particular “noise is tin cans off the back of a Just Married car.” There are several plot turns throughout the tale; readers will likely guess one well before it happens, but others are less predictable.
A clever, spirited story with a brainy, nimble heroine at the helm.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-73225-522-7
Page Count: 348
Publisher: Time Tunnel Media
Review Posted Online: April 8, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
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