Fourth thriller by Balling (Champion, 1988, etc.), this time focused on the Second Coming rather than on Nazis or 12th-century knights and ladies. Recently discovered in Samaria are scrolls and some mummified flesh and bone relating to Simon Magus (or Simon the Magician), a contemporary of Jesus who converted to Christianity. The scrolls, it seems, hold an incantation that needs the actual skin to work its magic. In a Harvard lab, young Allison Reese is checking the DNA in the flesh. When televangelist Bobby Jordan hears of all this, he sends his son and another heavy to get the skin, and the two leave Allison comatose. Meanwhile, Michael Beretta, in still another effort to recover the skin, is dispatched by Opus Dei, the CIA of the Vatican, to recruit help in breaking into Bobby Jordan’s island paradise and fabulous DNA laboratory on Miracle Isle off the coast of Maine. First, Beretta enlists Lara Brooks, a DNA specialist with a prosthetic leg who’s also the sister of a Jesuit priest, to go undercover and hire on at Miracle Isle. Then, since Miracle Isle is installing a supercomputer, he ropes in Allison’s father to get technical training and then masquerade as a computer expert. Can John Reese break into hidden files about the DNA? Also sneaking onto Miracle Isle is Allison’s former Japanese coworker Kenji Hamada, son of a top yakuza godfather. Kenji proudly tells his father that the skin contains a new gene that resists cellular senescence and that he needs his help in recovering it. Even more far-out: Bobby Jordan realizes that the relic is nothing less than a finger from the right hand of Christ—and that the Second Coming is promised when his Maine lab breaks down two new genes in the finger and fertilizes virginal Mary Joplin with them. . . . Strong start, and then a good idea dissolves in thuggery and gunfire.
Pub Date: April 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-312-86314-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1998
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
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