Full of misplaced Cold War nostalgia and dreary, threadbare characters. And really now, amnesia? In this day and age? With a...
From veteran spymeister Follett (The Hammer of Eden, 1998, etc.), the story of a the space race that never gets off the ground.
Amnesia is the engine Follett chooses to drive his latest and, not unexpectedly, the worn-out thing sputters. Dr. Luke Lucas, waking up on the cold, hard floor of a public toilet in Union Station, Washington, D.C.—headachy, nauseous, shabbily dressed—wonders how he got there. Well, thereby hangs the tale. It’s January 1958, mid–Cold War, and the Soviets have already orbited Sputnik. The Americans, intent on catching up, are set to launch the first US space satellite. Rocket scientist Luke is central to the success of the effort, in part because of his brilliant mathematical mind, but also because he’s accidentally stumbled on a plot to keep Explorer I from ever leaving its Cape Canaveral pad. Determined to block Luke’s attempt to block their attempt to block a launch, Communist agents have hijacked him and administered memory-robbing drugs, which explains his rude awakening. If that doesn’t work, they plan to knock him off him. Why not simply kill him and be done with it? More efficient, true, but a certain strategically placed CIA mole happens to have been Luke’s Harvard classmate, and at first he chooses friendship over pragmatism. So, though Luke no longer knows what he knew, the game’s afoot as our hero, in hiding, strives to retrieve enough of his memory to figure out why old pals and former lovers are now bent on betrayal, while the desperate Commies seek him here, there, and everywhere.
Full of misplaced Cold War nostalgia and dreary, threadbare characters. And really now, amnesia? In this day and age? With a straight face?Pub Date: Dec. 4, 2000
ISBN: 0-525-94563-6
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2000
Though his scenarios aren’t always plausible in strictest terms, King’s imagination, as always, yields a most satisfying...
King (Under the Dome, 2009, etc.) adds counterfactual historian to his list of occupations.
Well, not exactly: The author is really turning in a sturdy, customarily massive exercise in time travel that just happens to involve the possibility of altering history. Didn’t Star Trek tell us not to do that? Yes, but no matter: Up in his beloved Maine, which he celebrates eloquently here (“For the first time since I’d topped that rise on Route 7 and saw Dery hulking on the west bank of the Kenduskeag, I was happy”), King follows his own rules. In this romp, Jake Epping, a high-school English teacher (vintage King, that detail), slowly comes to see the opportunity to alter the fate of a friend who, in one reality, is hale and hearty but in another dying of cancer, no thanks to a lifetime of puffing unfiltered cigarettes. Epping discovers a time portal tucked away in a storeroom—don’t ask why there—and zips back to 1958, where not just his friend but practically everyone including the family pets smokes: “I unrolled my window to get away from the cigarette smog a little and watched a different world roll by.” A different world indeed: In this one, Jake, a sort of sad sack back in Reality 1, finds love and a new identity in Reality 2. Not just that, but he now sees an opportunity to unmake the past by inserting himself into some ugly business involving Lee Harvey Oswald, Jack Ruby, various representatives of the military-industrial-intelligence complex and JFK in Dallas in the fall of 1963. It would be spoiling things to reveal how things turn out; suffice it to say that any change in Reality 2 will produce a change in Reality 1, not to mention that Oswald may have been a patsy, just as he claimed—or maybe not. King’s vision of one outcome of the Kennedy assassination plot reminds us of what might have been—that is, almost certainly a better present than the one in which we’re all actually living. “If you want to know what political extremism can lead to,” warns King in an afterword, “look at the Zapruder film.”
Though his scenarios aren’t always plausible in strictest terms, King’s imagination, as always, yields a most satisfying yarn.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4516-2728-2
Page Count: 864
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2011
Slaughter (Cop Town, 2014, etc.) is so uncompromising in following her blood trails to the darkest places imaginable that...
Twenty-four years after a traumatic disappearance tore a Georgia family apart, Slaughter’s scorching stand-alone picks them up and shreds them all over again.
The Carrolls have never been the same since 19-year-old Julia vanished. After years of fruitlessly pestering the police, her veterinarian father, Sam, killed himself; her librarian mother, Helen, still keeps the girl's bedroom untouched, just in case. Julia’s sisters have been equally scarred. Lydia Delgado has sold herself for drugs countless times, though she’s been clean for years now; Claire Scott has just been paroled after knee-capping her tennis partner for a thoughtless remark. The evening that Claire’s ankle bracelet comes off, her architect husband, Paul, is callously murdered before her eyes and, without a moment's letup, she stumbles on a mountainous cache of snuff porn. Paul’s business partner, Adam Quinn, demands information from Claire and threatens her with dire consequences if she doesn’t deliver. The Dunwoody police prove as ineffectual as ever. FBI agent Fred Nolan is more suavely menacing than helpful. So Lydia and Claire, who’ve grown so far apart that they’re virtual strangers, are unwillingly thrown back on each other for help. Once she’s plunged you into this maelstrom, Slaughter shreds your own nerves along with those of the sisters, not simply by a parade of gruesome revelations—though she supplies them in abundance—but by peeling back layer after layer from beloved family members Claire and Lydia thought they knew. The results are harrowing.
Slaughter (Cop Town, 2014, etc.) is so uncompromising in following her blood trails to the darkest places imaginable that she makes most of her high-wire competition look pallid, formulaic, or just plain fake.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-242905-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015
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