A fast-paced international adventure featuring engaging characters.
In Aragon’s debut thriller, a French official’s attempt to arrest the president of the United States for war crimes sparks a firefight in Paris.
President Leyland Childs is planning a trip to the French capital, and he wants Secret Service Special Agent Isabella “Izzy” Stone, who’s already saved his life once, to be there by his side. Childs intends to work with French President Amaury Jardin to ease tensions between their countries, which stem from a covert U.S. missile strike in Islamabad that was aimed at a wanted terrorist. Tragically, a group of French middle-school children on a trip to the city were killed in the explosion. An angry mob in Paris then attacked the U.S. embassy, which, in turn, led to fiery anti-France protests in America. After POTUS gets to Paris, local magistrate André Malevu, who abhors American influence on French traditions, issues an arrest warrant for Childs. This results in a violent confrontation between Secret Service agents and members of the French special forces. In order to get the president to safety, Izzy and her team must head into the subterranean maze of Paris’s catacombs. This exhilarating underground pursuit is only part of the story, however, and Aragon keeps up an impressive pace throughout the novel. Its short sentences and chapters are packed with intriguing details, such as French rioters’ treatment of American tourists: “On the Seine an American couple was thrown overboard from a tourist boat plying the river.” Izzy is shown to be astute and resourceful, and not even a potential suitor, Liam Cabot of the British Embassy, can sway her ever-present caution; she even calls in a background check during their first meeting. Her bond with Childs, however, is the story’s strongest relationship. An early scene, in which she protects him from an assassination attempt, ably establishes their trust and shows why she’s the one in charge of the presidential detail.
A fast-paced international adventure featuring engaging characters.Pub Date: Nov. 21, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-9981612-0-4
Page Count: 456
Publisher: Oakhurst Print
Review Posted Online: May 15, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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