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
IN THE NEWS
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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