An audacious, entertaining fusion of Cold War espionage thriller and romance, this action-packed sequel to Bonner’s debut novel, Soleil Tangiere (2013), continues the adventures of Canadian heroine Tangiere and her Russian love interest, Max Stepanov.
Set largely in 1989 Switzerland, where Tangiere is running a holding company, the novel begins with her contemplating getting on with her life and dating again. Stepanov returned to the USSR months ago and inexplicably hasn’t contacted her since. But her problems become exponentially more complicated when her older sister, Camille, visits with her boyfriend, Kurt Ballas, who owns a small commodities trading firm in Chicago. After what was believed to be a failed assassination attempt on Ballas in the States, he is almost killed again on the streets of Zurich. While Tangiere tries to identify who is behind the attempted murders, Stepanov is being coerced by his morally bankrupt boss into smuggling millions of dollars’ worth of diamonds out of the USSR. Stepanov’s endgame, although inordinately dangerous, is to avoid being killed while fleeing the USSR and to somehow get back together with the love of his life. Along the way, as Tangiere and Stepanov attempt to reunite and rekindle their relationship, they battle ruthless smugglers, spies, assassins and jilted lovers. A minor but niggling flaw throughout is the author’s propensity to switch from third- to first-person narration, sometimes in the same sentence: “They had kissed long and hard, and then he got on the waiting jet, and it had roared down the runway and lifted off, heading to Moscow, and I couldn’t really look at it go….” Additionally, character development isn’t nearly as strong as that of the previous novel. Fortunately, the knotty storyline and adrenaline-fueled pacing all but make up for it.
A bombshell-laden storyline featuring a bombshell of a heroine whose over-the-top bravado makes Jack Reacher and Jason Bourne look like Boy Scouts.
Pub Date: July 24, 2014
ISBN: 978-0692224328
Page Count: 380
Publisher: Soleil, Too!
Review Posted Online: Oct. 9, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
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
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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