A warmed-over Bernard Samson (Spy Sinker, 1990, etc.) thriller that is sorely lacking violence, action, sex, bad guys, espionage, and high technology. It's the summer of 1987, and British spy Bernard is going through a difficult time. His wife, Fiona (also a secret agent), has just returned from East Germany, where she's spent enough time pretending to have defected that Bernard fell in love with another agent named Gloria, moved in with her, and watched her become the new mother to his and Fiona's prepubescent kids. But a few weeks ago, Fiona returned a hero and Bernard has had to dump Gloria, deal with not having been trusted with the truth of Fiona's mission, and cope with the guilt of the death of Fiona's sister Tessa, which reportedly occurred at the scene of Fiona's return to the West, although there's no body and lots of mystery surrounding who did it and why. Before Bernard has a chance to settle back into a life with Fiona, he's sent on a mission to make contact with a communist agent named Verdi, who London Central tells him wants to defect with passwords to East Germany's newly activated computerized intelligence material. Bernard visits his old East German haunts, gets into a few fistfights (but alas, only one shoot-out—and the bad guys don't even shoot back), sees some old friends, watches Fiona become his boss's right hand, learns of his wife's secret plan to uncover the truth of her sister's disappearance, and hears from Gloria that Fiona is undermining her family in a vicious act of revenge. The scene is set but nothing gets resolved. Bernard learns that Tessa may still be alive and in prison but, so as not to make waves, keeps this detail to himself. Gloria's suspicions about Fiona never get confirmed either way. Bernard successfully brings Verdi to London but then loses him to a sniper, destroying any chance of accessing the opposition's files. With vapid characters, murky plot, and infelicitous descriptions that include ``our footsteps crunching in the gravel like a company of soldiers marching though a bowl of cornflakes,'' this caper leaves you cold. (125,00 first printing; $150,000 ad/promo)
Pub Date: Jan. 4, 1995
ISBN: 0-06-017622-9
Page Count: 384
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1994
IN THE NEWS
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
