Ross (Double Cross Bind, 2005) makes good use of unfamiliar history in his second fast-moving thriller.
A smart-aleck American flyer and a cynical Russian officer, separated from their warfronts, become embroiled in plot and counterplot in World War II Switzerland, where the famous national neutrality seems to be so much fiction.
The flying skills of American Lieutenant Grant and his navigator Sergeant McNeil have brought them safely out of German air space, where they took numerous Nazi bullets, to a Swiss mountain top. By rights, they should be out of harm’s way. They’re not completely unscathed—McNeil being fairly banged up—but they’re alive and eager to tell their superiors about the amazing propeller-less Nazi plane they saw on their way to the crash landing. It was fast as blazes, but McNeil got some photographs of it, and Grant intends to get those pictures back to England as soon as he hooks up with the American embassy. Unfortunately, his American liaison seems more interested in accommodating Swiss laws than helping him out, leaving Grant in the hands of Nazi sympathizers who throw him in a nasty prison. Meanwhile, Russian Major Eduard Akimov, jerked from the battle of Stalingrad, has joined his diplomat father, who is in Switzerland for secret negotiations with the Nazis. The Soviets want the Major to track down his ex-wife Magda and her evidence of Swiss/German collaboration, information also sought by Anna Fay, the widow of Lt. Grant’s late comrade-in-arms. Anna is one of a small but gutsy band of anti-German Swiss nationals. Grant escapes his jailers, finds Anna and her clever young son Christoph, and sets on a parallel course with Akimov in the hunt for Magda. Their heels are dogged by a sadistic German who has imprisoned Magda’s daughter and will not hesitate to snatch Christoph. All parties are convinced that they hold the outcome of the war in their hands, and they may be right.
Ross (Double Cross Bind, 2005) makes good use of unfamiliar history in his second fast-moving thriller.Pub Date: July 31, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-385-51389-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2007
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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