Though not as tightly wound as Janeway’s first two adventures, this one is still endlessly inventive, exhilarating, and...
That eminent Victorian scholar-adventurer, Sir Richard Burton, is both subject and role model for antiquarian bookseller Cliff Janeway’s long-awaited third case.
Flush with reward money from his Seattle caper (The Bookman’s Wake, 1995), ex–Denver homicide cop Janeway splurges on an inscribed copy of Burton’s Pilgrimage to Medina and Mecca. Soon thereafter he gets an unannounced visit from Josephine Gallant, ancient granddaughter of Charles Warren—the American companion to Burton’s storied but mysteriously unwritten 1860 tour of South Carolina—who tells Janeway she once owned the book he’s purchased and begs him to recover the rest of her library of Burtoniana, lost decades ago to a swindling family of Baltimore booksellers. Learning that nefarious Dean and Carl Treadwell are still carrying on the family business under the same roof, Janeway takes off for the East Coast, but not before his quest, in the first of many well-planned surprises, claims the life of an innocent friend. The ensuing blend of historical pastiche and violence is so satisfying that most readers will overlook or forgive the scant connection between the breathless present-day search for Burton’s lost memoir of his southern journey and the revelation of what’s between that book’s covers: news that Burton may have played a part in igniting the war.
Though not as tightly wound as Janeway’s first two adventures, this one is still endlessly inventive, exhilarating, and literate. Quite a knockout punch for a used bookseller.Pub Date: March 9, 2004
ISBN: 0-7432-4992-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
In his fourth outing, Cullen's ace foreign correspondent Colin Burke (Dispatch from a Cold Country, 1996, etc.) bears witness to the world-shaking meltdown of Saudi Arabia. Having broken the news that the US plans to sell an advanced missile-defense system to the oil-rich kingdom, the Washington Tribune reporter learns that the Saudi husband of a childhood sweetheart is on trial for his life in Riyadh. Slipping into the authoritarian monarchy, he manages to file copy on the summary proceedings via satellite. Burke's dispatch puts pressure on Washington to save the condemned man (who served as an unpaid CIA informant), and his release precipitates a mass protest by Islamic extremists opposed to the royal house's corruption and dissolute life style. The fundamentalists seize power with shocking speed, arrest Burke, and announce the establishment of an Iran-like theocracy, a substantive increase in petroleum prices, and curtailed crude shipments to the West. With the domestic price of gasoline spiraling upward and lines lengthening at American service stations, the US President takes decisive, if ill-advised, action, ordering Army Rangers unconvincingly disguised as Arab soldiers to seize control of the ultrasacred mosque in Mecca from the rebels who hold it and restore a manageable Saudi princeling to the throne. Resilient Burke (who has again eluded his captors) observes the preparations for the counterattack and its subsequent failure. But chastened by his longtime love Desdemona McCoy (a CIA operative on the scene to oversee the doomed operation), he fails to alert the Trib's editors. In the wake of the inevitable disaster, the disgraced journalist retreats to the States, where he attempts to ensure that his paramour doesn't become a vengeful administration's showcase scapegoat. An absorbing blend of geopolitical intrigue, narrow escapes, religious zealotry, mob violence, armed conflict, and expedient betrayal—all while posing thought-provoking questions about press responsibilities in both open and closed societies.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-449-00025-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1997
Hawaiian-Jewish cop Denil Kahane limns Nora Wolfe, who has hired a boy-toy to kill her husband, like this: ``Thirty-seven or thirty-eight is the perfect age for a woman. . . The rose is no longer a dewy bud holding tight to its promise, rather it is in full long-petalled sweet high-test perfumed blood-red and glorious bloom.'' Gordon's funfilled debut novel carries a big hook. Aside from noir plotting familiar as an old slipper, the most attractive features of his breakthrough from the prose-shrinking strictures of screenwriting (the grittily bravura Murder in the First) are Gordon's firespurting pinwheel rhapsodies on women, adolescence, and whatever he's looking at when his loose and swirling endorphins explode. On Maui, Nora Wolfe seduces monosyllabic teen-surfer Chad into the old Postman Always Rings Twice/Double Indemnity ploy of you-murder-my-rich-husband-Jack-and-we'll-have-sex-forever. At 15, Nora was a runaway tied to a druggie rock musician who broke her jaw; at 20, she was fresh meat in L.A. and had her jaw broken by a German industrialist; at 35, she shot a Japanese trick twice, killing him, then fell under the wing of Jack Wolfe. But today Jack is actually broke and wants Chad to ``murder'' him so Nora will get Jack's $15M insurance payoff. In Hawaii a body is not needed for a death declared, only a murderer. So Nora need only say Chad offed Jack for the death to be valid. Where's Jack's body?—why, eaten by sharks! When Nora and Chad plan a triple cross, and Jack a quadruple, the plot flipflops: each side knows fully and agrees to the other's motives. This half-serious noir satire could have a large but brief future, while Gordon's deliriously erotic prosebursts may well win him a lasting readership.
Pub Date: Nov. 12, 1997
ISBN: 0-312-16876-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1997
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