More misses than hits in Silver’s second novel of an avenging police sniper whose quest to kill his father’s murderers is threatened when he’s caught in legal crossfire. The joys of the insurance industry and right-wing cant, two obsessions that hamstrung Silver’s first effort (Assumption of Risk, 1996), also bring down this more accomplished tale just when it begins to take off. During the closing days of the Viet Nam War, a weary rifle platoon frags its commanding officer, disguises the killing as a Viet Cong ambush, and escapes unpunished. Some years later, Army sniper Aaron Longbaugh uses his almost superhuman skills to murder his father’s killers, who have become, thanks to age and repressed guilt, so repugnantly decrepit that they almost don’t deserve a flawless execution. Silver’s writing soars as Aaron, a camouflaged avenger moving soundlessly through picture-postcard American woodland, blows away his unwitting victims with an almost loving grace, covering his tracks expertly. But Aaron runs into trouble—and Silver’s story bogs down—when Aaron’s doing his day job as a police sniper. After he shoots Monnell Bennett, a well-armed, murderously crazed car-jacking fiend who had taken an entire shopping mall hostage, Aaron and the Westport, Ohio, police department are slapped with a preposterous wrongful death suit by the scheming, cravenly hypocritical former ACLU lawyer Julia Chandler Disare. Vanessa Liu Tau, a Vietnamese American claims adjuster, gets involved because her company holds the policy on the cops. During a tediously detailed investigation of Aaron’s background, Vanessa finds discrepancies suggesting that this tall, handsome, quietly brooding, and conveniently unmarried police sharpshooter, with whom she is rapidly falling in love, might just be a serial murderer. Silver’s story here drops dead in its tracks. Good action scenes, but little else: a badly aimed blast of right-wing wrong-headedness
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-684-84289-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
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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