A well-crafted sci-fi thriller despite its unlikely hero and dangling conclusion.
A reporter’s obsession with the takedown of a corrupt billionaire pulls him into the secret, macabre biotech world of a mad scientist and his diabolical benefactor.
James Dysart is the improbable central protagonist of Gould’s debut sci-fi thriller. A gruff, middle-aged, twice-divorced alcoholic whose halcyon days at the Chicago Tribune are waning, James is still hunting for the investigative piece that will burnish his reputation and maybe bring down his nemesis, Richard Bassett. A corrupt Chicago real estate developer, Bassett has an assortment of politicians in his very deep pockets. Enter the beautiful, young, smart Sharon Hodges. She has been brought on as a summer intern at the Tribune, and James is ordered to mentor her. But Sharon has her own agenda. A decade earlier, her father, Stephan, was reported missing and declared dead after a boating accident on Lake Michigan. She is convinced the brilliant, cutting-edge stem-cell researcher faked his own death, and she wants James to help find him. The enticement of a potentially explosive story, plus an unexpected night of passion in Sharon’s apartment, ensnares James in a dangerous web of deception that puts his life at risk and plays havoc with his emotional defenses. The backbone of this complicated story is a sometimes too-technical scientific journey, beginning with Stephan’s early, unauthorized experiments to induce a state of hibernation in higher order mammals, potentially slowing the progression of disease—maybe even the aging process itself—and moving forward into a dark corner of present-day laboratory organ regeneration. The solid narrative is plot-driven. Although Gould fleshes out his main characters, he does this primarily by inserting long diversions detailing their back stories, sometimes breaking the high-octane pace of a gruesome page-turner loaded with twists. An underlying battle between good and evil is personified in Sharon, the second-generation genius plagued by internal demons that make her actions unpredictable, and Bassett, the behind-the-scenes puppet master. The flawed James is Sharon’s chance for love. Her instability provides the tension to keep readers hooked.
A well-crafted sci-fi thriller despite its unlikely hero and dangling conclusion.Pub Date: Jan. 2, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9982758-2-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Grael Publishing
Review Posted Online: June 23, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
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