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
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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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