Mild-mannered supercontractor John Deal tackles a crazed cyberevangelist and his murderous minions—in the least finely nuanced, and most conventional, of Standiford's five thrillers (Deal to Die For, 1995, etc.). There can't be much worse than having a superconglomerate ``media sales center'' move into the same Coral Gables neighborhood as your mom-and-pop bookstore, threatening to undersell you, offer a more diverse stock, and drive you out of business so that it can jack up prices and cut back services- -unless of course it's getting murdered by a pair of comic-book killers just as you've come up with something that might have stopped the Mega-Media project from ever getting off the drawing board. Of course, Deal doesn't know why his old friend Arch Dolan, mainstay of Dolan's House of Books, was killed and his inoffensive Uncle Els left in a coma—but we do, and that's just the trouble. In the opening chapter, even before Arch Dolan is cooling on the mortuary slab, Standiford fingers the Rev. James Ray Willis, megalomaniacal messiah of the Worldwide Church of Light, who's convinced that the way to escape the international conspiracy of one-world, liberal-humanist thought control is to get there first with the most. In the Rev.'s case, that means a close bonding with Mega-Media and sending in the shock troops- -Dexter and Iris Kittle, a graying pair of killers from Omaha- -when negotiations stall. It's fun watching these saintly assassins dispatch Willis's more venal obstacles, but the fun is strictly one-dimensional, as is the reunion of Deal and his estranged wife Janice (paging Geena Davis) to overcome the emotional wounds in their marriage and inflict some serious wounds of the pleasanter kind back in the Nebraska tundra. A mega-villain bent on world domination, a pair of grotesque husband-and-wife hitfolk, a damsel in heavy-breathing distress, a pure avenger and his lady, a blizzardy finale. And you thought James Bond was passÇ. ($30,000 ad/promo; author tour)
Pub Date: Feb. 19, 1997
ISBN: 0-06-017620-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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