A jumpy and complex spy puzzle—scooting back and forth between 1941 and 1978—that's pretty darn good but should perhaps have been a great deal better; one often has the feeling with the prolific John Gardner (The Werewolf Trance) that a really first-rate spy novel would emerge if he'd only give it enough time to grow. The contrived shenanigans here begin in 1978 when a middle-aged German woman appears in London, inquiring about the grave of her husband—a Nazi spy allegedly executed during World War II. But Herbie Kruger of British Intelligence, who sees this frau as a potential recruit for his new European espionage network, finds no record of such a Nazi spy—till he digs out some old top-security Fries about Operation Nostradamus, a WW II plan to create dissension among Nazi bigwigs by playing on their belief in the occult soothsayings of 16th-century seer Michel de Nostradame. Herbie, determined to ferret out the frau's complete background, enlists the help of a survivor of Op Nostradamus, now a top man at British Intelligence, who agrees to recall the whole 1941 operation (his first) in detail. Thus the recurring flashbacks—about the young British agent's arrival in France, about his passionate affair with a Resistance mademoiselle, and about the occult-spreading mission and how it somehow escalated into an assassination attempt on Himmler deep in Germany. Meanwhile, back in 1978, someone's trying to kill the frau; and the link between past and present turns out to be a winner indeed—the sort of gnarled fabric that Le Carre would have fine-stitched into a dark, rich tapestry. With Gardner, however, one admires the cleverness but winds up wondering why the book that leads up to it—except for big, slow, Mahler-loving Herbie, who's a dandily downbeat hero-never settles down and takes hold. Still: yards above the run of the espionage mill.
Pub Date: May 25, 1979
ISBN: 0553141457
Page Count: 260
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1979
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
