Historical intrigue and well-narrated suspense make this adventure an absorbing mystery.
In the eighth Bertrand McAbee mystery, McCaffrey’s (The Marksman’s Case, 2008, etc.) classics professor turned detective returns to unearth the forgotten secrets of the Byzantine Empire.
Stricken with terminal cancer, elderly Greek–American Alexei Kostadelos entrusts McAbee with an unusual mission: travel to Mt. Athos in Greece to pry some sensitive information out of Father Nicholas, a reclusive monk. Years ago when Alexei and Nicholas fought together in the Greek resistance against the occupying Nazis, they discovered a secret about the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453. Is it possible that the Byzantine emperor was not killed in the famous siege but instead took to the underground? With Alexei dying and Nicholas old and frail, this history-changing revelation is in danger of being lost to time unless scholarly McAbee can uncover proof in the form of artifacts buried on the island of Lesbos. He finds assistance in Jack, a shady, paranoid former military operative he employs for dirty work and muscle, and in Alexei’s niece, Yota, a temperamental archaeology professor with whom McAbee develops a subtle flirtation. A mysterious German with a decades-old connection to Alexei and a shadowy group of Romanian monks complicate matters. The genial, bookish McAbee finds himself in a world of intrigue, ruthlessness and covert action, circumstances that add depth to his character. It also provides some low-key comic moments: McAbee has a habit of fretting over his supply of digestive cookies and wandering off to visit museums and relics that have nothing to do with his mission. Yet McAbee’s curiosity combined with his iron-willed determination makes it unwise to underestimate him. The book feels most alive when it’s firmly in McAbee’s wheelhouse—studying documents on Constantinople, noting with interest the intricacies of Greek history and national character, and delving into the murky relations between the monks at Mt. Athos. When the novel turns to Jack’s action-oriented area of expertise, things feel a bit more perfunctory. Even so, McCaffrey’s mystery thrills with well-drawn characters, solid procedural details and strong storytelling.
Historical intrigue and well-narrated suspense make this adventure an absorbing mystery.Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2010
ISBN: 978-1452072241
Page Count: 316
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: May 1, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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