Deighton artfully fills in more blanks in the long-running saga of British espionage agent Bernard Samson, the protagonist in two earlier trilogies and the featured attraction of this sequel to Faith (1995). It's the fall of 1987, and Bernard has taken arms against a sea of troubles. His wife Fiona (a fellow spy)—now back from East Germany, where she penetrated the Stasi as a sham defector—is behaving oddly, and her return has obliged him to dump Gloria, a luscious Hungarian operative with whom he's been making soul- satisfying whoopee. Meanwhile, Bernard's brother-in-law George Kosinski has gone missing. Married to Fiona's sister Tessa (apparently killed in Berlin during the former's flight back to the West), George is a wealthy, first-generation Englishman of affairs. His disappearance triggers alarms and excursions at London Central, where Bernard's Oxbridge-educated masters decree that the suspected runaway must be located. With inept assistance from his twitty but ruthlessly ambitious boss, Dickey Cruyer, Bernard tracks his quarry through the back alleys of Zurich and Warsaw to a down-at-heels estate near the Polish/Russian frontier, where the elusive George still has family. Presented with grisly physical evidence of George's death, the credulous Dickey calls a halt to the search. Once back in the UK, Bernard (who puts no stock in the official version of George's fate) is reassigned to his old stamping ground in Berlin, where the opposition takes its best shot at him. Recalled to London after George's been spotted alive and well in the homeland of his parents, world-weary Bernard goes back to winter-bound Poland to oversee a daring extraction designed to bring him and a suspected turncoat home free. Vivid, class-conscious characters whose fond pageants play out amidst the workaday deceits of the intelligence game, plus plot twists and violent action galore: one of the more absorbing entries in Deighton's ongoing series. (First printing of 70,000; Literary Guild alternate selection; $175,000 ad/promo)
Pub Date: Jan. 3, 1996
ISBN: 0-06-017696-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1995
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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