The villains have little impact in this tale, but its white-collar plot is continually fascinating.
A scientist’s attempt to secure funding to harvest Ghana’s African plants for medicinal value becomes not-so-simple when Russian gun smugglers and Muslim terrorists demand a cut in Shields’ (Double Dealing, 2012) thriller.
Bioengineer Allan Sinclair is excited to tell his girlfriend, Lisa Sharpe, about a West African nutmeg plant, Kombo, that may offer a breakthrough for treating Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases. Lisa relays this information to her venture-capital firm’s boss, Scott Sherman, whose mother has Alzheimer’s. He finds out that his former Cornell University colleague, professor John Stamen, has the patent on Kombo, so Scott gets funding from pharmaceutical company Wyzer and travels to Ghana with John. They’re promptly kidnapped by Richard Akromah, a rebel whose armed men are running protection rackets on illegal mining operations. Lisa and Scott’s best friend, journalist Mark Halper, helps with the ransom payment, but Richard, seeking amnesty from a 50-year-old murder, ultimately becomes their partner, helping to collect Kombo for a profit. Unfortunately, Richard has shady associates in his past. One is gun smuggler Sergei Andreyavich, who set up Richard’s bank account 15 years before and isn’t happy about recent transactions; he assumes correctly that Richard’s now in business with someone in the United States. He and his Russian pals are willing to align themselves with terrorists in order to get the money they feel Richard owes them. Although this book contains thriller components, such as the ever present Russian threat, its high-speed resolutions curtail the suspense; a hostage situation, for example, is resolved in the course of a relatively short scene. Nevertheless, Shields excels at the surprisingly riveting financial aspects; Richard may be a criminal, but Scott is equally ruthless in setting up shop with John, despite what it does to Lisa’s relationship with Allan. Politically, the story stays middle-of-the-road. It’s indisputable that Ghana has been victimized (or “raped,” as a local doctor puts it) by foreign companies for its natural resources, but big money is also shown to be a necessity to get projects off the ground; for example, Allan, on his own and without steady revenue, makes no headway. Shields rounds out his story with melodrama, such as when a distraught Lisa continually checks to see if Allan has left her a message.
The villains have little impact in this tale, but its white-collar plot is continually fascinating.Pub Date: May 17, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-78301-901-4
Page Count: 372
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 2, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
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
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