Under all the sumptuous detail, sensitive psychology, and incisive condemnation of industrial cartels, this is still at its...
In the absence of the Evil Empire, global capitalism takes it on the chin once more in this hypertrophied whodunit, the most intimate of le Carré’s thrillers since the salad days of George Smiley.
Tessa Quayle, an aid worker married to a much older career diplomat currently stationed in Nairobi, has always managed her ambiguous relationship to Sorbonne-trained African Dr. Arnold Bluhm with admirable discretion. But now the lid is blown off their companionship by the news that Tessa’s been found raped and murdered during an expedition she and Bluhm made from a North Kenyan lodge. Among the hothouse world of the British legation, which le Carré limns with merciless precision, the whispers start overnight, soon confirmed by the police announcement that the evidence against the missing Dr. Bluhm is conclusive. After hovering over Sandy Woodrow, who jeopardized his career as Head of Chancery in Nairobi when he sent Tessa a note asking her to elope with him, le Carré follows Tessa’s widower, inoffensive amateur gardener Justin Quayle, whose grilling by a pair of Scotland Yard officers fans into flame his suspicion that the confinement in Uhuru Hospital that ended his muckraking wife’s pregnancy in stillbirth revealed to her a secret dangerous enough to kill for. Beneath the ceremonious blather of the diplomatic corps, the police, the Home Office, and pharmaceutical giant Karel Vita Hudson, Justin finds a conspiracy as broad and greedy as the scandals of Single & Single (1999), and as ruthless in protecting its turf. He follows the trail from Italy to Germany to Canada to a showdown in the Sudan with a pitiable villain who, like everyone else in this elegantly overextended novel, just can’t stop talking.
Under all the sumptuous detail, sensitive psychology, and incisive condemnation of industrial cartels, this is still at its core the old, familiar story of a decent man driven to avenge the wife he never really knew.Pub Date: Jan. 9, 2001
ISBN: 0-7432-1505-2
Page Count: 484
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2000
BOOK TO SCREEN
Magnificent writing, nonetheless, makes the best case yet for putting McCarthy on a pedestal just below the one occupied by...
Almost as frustrating as it is commanding, McCarthy’s ninth (and first since the completion of his Border Trilogy: Cities of the Plain, 1998, etc.) is a formidable display of stunningly written scenes that don’t quite cohere into a fully satisfying narrative.
It’s a bleak chronicle of murder, revenge and implacable fate pocked with numerous echoes of McCarthy’s great Blood Meridian (1985). Here, the story’s set in 1980 in southern Texas near the Mexican border, where aging Sheriff Bell, a decorated WWII veteran, broods heroically over the territory he’s sworn to protect, while—in a superb, sorrowful monologue—acknowledging the omnipresence of ineradicable evil all around him. Then the focus trains itself on Vietnam vet Llewellyn Moss, a hunter who stumbles upon several dead bodies, a stash of Mexican heroin and more than $2 million in cash that he absconds with. The tale then leaps among the hunted (Moss), an escaped killer (Anton Chigurh), whose crimes include double-crossing the drug cartel from which the money was taken, the Army Special Forces freelancer (Carson Wells) hired by druglords and—in dogged pursuit of all the horrors spawned by their several interactions—the intrepid, however flawed and guilty, stoical Sheriff Bell: perhaps the most fully human and sympathetic character McCarthy has ever created. The justly praised near-biblical style, an artful fusion of brisk declarative sentences and vivid, simple images, confers horrific intensity on the escalating violence and chaos, while precisely dramatizing the sense of nemesis that pursues and punishes McCarthy’s characters (scorpions in a sealed bottle). But this eloquent melodrama is seriously weakened by its insufficiently varied reiterated message: “if you were Satan . . . tryin to bring the human race to its knees, what you would probably come up with is narcotics.”
Magnificent writing, nonetheless, makes the best case yet for putting McCarthy on a pedestal just below the one occupied by William Faulkner.Pub Date: July 25, 2005
ISBN: 0-375-40677-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2005
IN THE NEWS
Thriller fans will delight in this latest escapade. Cussler and co-author Burcell have delivered a winner.
The 10th and latest Sam and Remi Fargo adventure (The Romanov Ransom, 2017, etc.) is a fast-paced tale that reaches back to the early days of automotive glory.
In Manchester, England, in 1906, the Gray Ghost has gone missing. That’s the Rolls-Royce prototype developed by Charles Rolls and Henry Royce, and the loss threatens to financially ruin them. They hire a detective to locate it, but he is murdered. In the present day, Sam and Remi Fargo hear about the car, which turned up after World War II but is now missing again. It's always been owned by the Payton family, which generations ago was the Oren-Payton family, and may be worth many millions of dollars. Raising the stakes even higher, the 1906 thieves may have hidden treasure inside the car, though there was no trace of it when the Gray Ghost was found after the war. But jealous modern-day cousin Arthur Oren has the car stolen and then loses track of it—has the thief he hired stolen it twice? It’s a complicated and clever plot, with Sam and Remi trying to find it for the current owner, Lord Albert Payton, Viscount Wellswick. The 1906 journal of Jonathon Payton, fifth Viscount Wellswick, provides a solid backstory. The Fargos are great series characters, whip-smart and altruistic self-made multimillionaires who can afford to take time from their charity work to dabble in dangerous adventures. Oren knows they’re involved, and he wants them both dead and the car returned. An accomplice suggests first making the Fargos destitute by freezing their bank accounts and credit cards. Then the bad guys can arrange a fake suicide. It’s fun to watch Sam and Remi get out of dicey scrapes, once by driving an Ahrens-Fox pumper fire engine out of a blazing building. Oren asks, “How hard is it to knock off two socialites?” He finds out the hard way; he should have just acquainted himself with Cussler’s series.
Thriller fans will delight in this latest escapade. Cussler and co-author Burcell have delivered a winner.Pub Date: May 29, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-7352-1873-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: April 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2018
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