An intricate, compelling tale with a financial backdrop.
Debut author McInerny follows a young lawyer who’s up against the deadly forces of the international banking system in this financial thriller.
It’s 1994, and when Kenna Rand’s law-partner grandfather dies suddenly in Central Park, it’s assumed that he suffered a heart attack. However, Kenna suspects foul play. At the wake, she’s approached by Michael Fein, a lawyer representing an American Jewish organization in possession of Weimar government bonds, now worth hundreds of millions of dollars—if the German government decides to recognize them. Kenna’s grandfather was about to represent Fein’s organization at the Bank for International Settlements in Switzerland, so Fein asks Kenna, an expert in the arcane field of pre–World War II gold bonds, to take his place. She’s attracted to the idea of finishing the work, although she has an incomplete notion of the risk involved. If Germany makes good, it would deplete their reserves and destabilize the nascent, fragile European Union. Additionally, the bonds represent an embarrassing complicity between the U.S. government, American firms, and Hitler’s Germany—one that many would prefer to keep concealed. Thus Kenna confronts a number of adversaries, including a murderous former U.S. secretary of state, a CIA man with a tendency to go rogue, and an avaricious countess out to seize what she wants at any cost. McInerny’s prose is sharp and stylish; for example, a railway station is said to dominate Zurich’s banking district “like a dowager-queen among courtiers”; the aforementioned countess is described as wearing “elaborate makeup and hair piled up on her head like a concoction of marzipan.” The book’s interest in the minutiae of bonds and settlements lends it an unusual verisimilitude that balances out the more cloak-and-dagger aspects of the plot. Overall, McInerny works comfortably within the genre rather than reinventing it, but fans of thrillers should enjoy this complex, historically based story of restitution, revenge, and redemption.
An intricate, compelling tale with a financial backdrop.Pub Date: Jan. 18, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-9847294-1-8
Page Count: 408
Publisher: Size Four Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 22, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
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
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