Retired airline and Air Force pilot Nance improves steadily, this time borrowing from his own plot for Pandora's Clock (1995) but leaving out the romance. Former Navy pilot Scott McKay has started up his own airline for hauling air freight. Things are going well—until he discovers while in flight that a crate he's carrying holds an armed 20-megaton hydrogen bomb hitched to a deadly new device that will send out an electromagnetic shock wave. The wave's superpulse will turn every computer chip in the US into stone. Planes now aloft will be helpless, and the entire financial and banking system will collapse, bringing on worldwide chaos. All defense systems as well will destruct—and as many as a million people may die when the bomb goes off with the force of a hundred Hiroshimas. McKay discovers this horror while circling Washington, D.C., awaiting landing instructions. Will D.C. be wiped out and uninhabitable for a thousand years? McKay has two crew members on board and two passengers. One is Vivian Henry, whose late husband, a disgruntled defense physicist, created the bomb and sealed it into a steel case armed with sensors that will set it off should its case be tampered with. Simultaneously, the worst hurricane in recorded history is chewing up the East Coast like a titanic lawnmower. The other passenger is Doctor Linda McCoy, a hugely intelligent meteorologist just back from Antarctica and riding herd on some secret instruments of her own in the hold. Meanwhile, the FBI, the Air Force, defense experts, and the President try to get McKay to land so that bomb experts can dismantle the ticking bomb. McKay refuses- -the bomb is beyond dismantling—and heads out to sea into the storm. Then things get worse . . . . Nothing new, maybe, but a thriller that grips and absolutely doesn't let go. (First printing of 100,000)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-385-48343-0
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1996
Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.
Pub Date: April 5, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-41224-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
A kind of Holden Caulfield who speaks bravely and winningly from inside the sorrows of autism: wonderful, simple, easy,...
Britisher Haddon debuts in the adult novel with the bittersweet tale of a 15-year-old autistic who’s also a math genius.
Christopher Boone has had some bad knocks: his mother has died (well, she went to the hospital and never came back), and soon after he found a neighbor’s dog on the front lawn, slain by a garden fork stuck through it. A teacher said that he should write something that he “would like to read himself”—and so he embarks on this book, a murder mystery that will reveal who killed Mrs. Shears’s dog. First off, though, is a night in jail for hitting the policeman who questions him about the dog (the cop made the mistake of grabbing the boy by the arm when he can’t stand to be touched—any more than he can stand the colors yellow or brown, or not knowing what’s going to happen next). Christopher’s father bails him out but forbids his doing any more “detecting” about the dog-murder. When Christopher disobeys (and writes about it in his book), a fight ensues and his father confiscates the book. In time, detective-Christopher finds it, along with certain other clues that reveal a very great deal indeed about his mother’s “death,” his father’s own part in it—and the murder of the dog. Calming himself by doing roots, cubes, prime numbers, and math problems in his head, Christopher runs away, braves a train-ride to London, and finds—his mother. How can this be? Read and see. Neither parent, if truth be told, is the least bit prepossessing or more than a cutout. Christopher, though, with pet rat Toby in his pocket and advanced “maths” in his head, is another matter indeed, and readers will cheer when, way precociously, he takes his A-level maths and does brilliantly.
A kind of Holden Caulfield who speaks bravely and winningly from inside the sorrows of autism: wonderful, simple, easy, moving, and likely to be a smash.Pub Date: June 17, 2003
ISBN: 0-385-50945-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2003
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