A sensational protagonist highlights a tale that’s full of intrigue.
In Roberts’ debut thriller, an Indonesian police officer aids Interpol in taking down a powerful cartel that’s manufacturing drugs in a number of countries, including her own.
Sarah Michelle Dharmawan of the Indonesian National Police is in Manchester, England, getting briefed on her latest assignment. She’s a well-trained and well-respected officer who was part of an anti-terrorist unit in Jakarta, although she’s required to keep mum about the membership. Now, in her latest posting, she’s the liaison between the INP and the Interpol Incident Response Team, which is focusing its efforts on the Irish Cartel, which has its origins in Northern Ireland. Although the Good Friday Agreement sought to decommission paramilitary groups in the late 1990s, some criminals continued to profit from existing drug operations. The Irish Cartel, which concentrates on producing and distributing MDMA, aka ecstasy, has drug factories in the United Kingdom, the Republic of Ireland, and, according to recent intel, Indonesia. Sarah’s initial task is to help locate the Indonesian facility, but soon she’s working with team member Michael Adrian of the British Army. His plan is to bait Irish Cartel members into an ambush. However, the cartel retaliates by targeting Michael and Sarah for abduction. It’s essentially an assassination order, as noted cartel member Niall Schroeder delights in disemboweling captive women and beating men to death. The Interpol Incident Response Team, meanwhile, identifies and, with the assistance of the military, subsequently raids the cartel’s drug factories. But tensions rise when the villains kidnap someone, as there’s little time before Niall’s interrogation tactics will turn lethal. Roberts’ novel showcases a skilled female protagonist whose accomplishments are impressive. Although the author’s repeated descriptions of Sarah’s physical allure and muscular abdominals are excessive, she’s also shown to thrive in a male-dominated industry, and the author tackles this milieu with finesse and guile. Still, her Interpol boss, Christopher Broussard is worried about putting her out in the field, as the Interpol IRT has lost a member, Karen Wilson, to the atrocious Niall. Indeed, this cartel member is the source of much of the story’s violence; none of it is overtly graphic, although it does succeed at clarifying the dangerous circumstances of Sarah’s and Michael’s work. The striking action scenes are rife with guns, knives, and explosions. Perhaps the most remarkable scene in the novel relies on stealth, as a balaclava-clad Sarah creeps into a bad guy’s house, slowly clearing rooms while eluding security cameras at the same time. The romance between Sarah and Michael happens rather quickly, but it does provide some relief from the bloody confrontations and adds complexity to the sometimes-withdrawn characters. Nevertheless, a sequence in which the couple enjoys a vacation (of sorts) in Herefordshire is too long and slows the momentum. For the most part, though, Roberts manages to instill a sense of dread, as it takes quite some time for Sarah to find the Indonesian facility; also, someone is feeding information to the Irish Cartel.
A sensational protagonist highlights a tale that’s full of intrigue.Pub Date: Jan. 21, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4834-5984-4
Page Count: 442
Publisher: Lulu Publishing Services
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.
Pub Date: April 5, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-41224-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
Not as thematically ambitious as Whitehead’s earlier work, but a whole lot of fun to read.
Another surprise from an author who never writes the same novel twice.
Though Whitehead has earned considerable critical acclaim for his earlier work—in particular his debut (The Intuitionist, 1999) and its successor (John Henry Days, 2001)—he’ll likely reach a wider readership with his warmest novel to date. Funniest as well, though there have been flashes of humor throughout his writing. The author blurs the line between fiction and memoir as he recounts the coming-of-age summer of 15-year-old Benji Cooper in the family’s summer retreat of New York’s Sag Harbor. “According to the world, we were the definition of paradox: black boys with beach houses,” writes Whitehead. Caucasians are only an occasional curiosity within this idyll, and parents are mostly absent as well. Each chapter is pretty much a self-contained entity, corresponding to a rite of passage: getting the first job, negotiating the mysteries of the opposite sex. There’s an accident with a BB gun and plenty of episodes of convincing someone older to buy beer, but not much really happens during this particular summer. Yet by the end of it, Benji is well on his way to becoming Ben, and he realizes that he is a different person than when the summer started. He also realizes that this time in his life will eventually live only in memory. There might be some distinctions between Benji and Whitehead, though the novelist also spent his youthful summers in Sag Harbor and was the same age as Benji in 1985, when the novel is set. Yet the first-person narrator has the novelist’s eye for detail, craft of character development and analytical instincts for sharp social commentary.
Not as thematically ambitious as Whitehead’s earlier work, but a whole lot of fun to read.Pub Date: April 28, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-385-52765-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2009
BOOK TO SCREEN
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