The casual purchase of a cheap copy of the Quran on the streets of Baghdad leads to a shocking discovery and a plot spanning half the Middle East.
When Miami journalist Carlos Lopez discovers an old parchment tucked inside the Quran he buys from a street vendor in Baghdad, he brings it to his friend Professor Prescott for help in deciphering it. Idle curiosity turns far more serious when the professor turns up dead shortly afterward, prompting Lopez to visit Cairo in an attempt to figure out why this document would be motive for murder. He quickly finds himself allied with Cyril Sahani of the Department of Lost and Stolen Antiquities of the Egyptian Ministry of Culture—despite the baroque title, Cyril is frequently armed and is by a wide margin the book’s most interesting character. The two of them—an odd-couple pairing that never quite ignites—embark on a quest that takes them from Damascus to Morocco, with many a stop in between for kidnapping, gunplay and visits to a series of ancient clerics and Quran experts. The mysterious fragment looks to be a lost writing of the Prophet and therefore a potentially world-changing discovery. The pair’s activities don’t go unnoticed—not only are they dogged by the agents of potential buyers, they’re shadowed by secret religious forces intent on preventing their find from ever becoming public knowledge. These secretive forces employ an enormous wrestler and a deadly assassin/Shakespeare buff named Othello Woo who steals every scene he’s in—between jobs ice-picking his helpless victims to death, he laments that there’s so much violence in the world. Unfortunately, Roig’s prose is often too wooden for the excitement of the plot he’s dreamed up. The story is told in the present tense, which is trickier than it looks, but readers will keep going just the same. A thought-provoking, intriguingly religious take on the standard international thriller.
Pub Date: March 25, 2011
ISBN: 978-1456773229
Page Count: 235
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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