Clunkily written (did “OK” really turn up in Tudor parlance?) and overplotted.
Elizabethan spycraft links parallel plots in the 16th and 21st centuries.
First-timer Silbert draws heavily on her impressive academic and professional background (Ivy League, Oxford, private investigation) as she lays out simultaneous skullduggeries in two Elizabethan epochs. Both plots have to do with the scrapbook compiled by a Tudor spymaster that has popped up in Tony Blair’s modern monarchy. Many corpses went into the compilation of the encoded spy saga, and its rediscovery has led to a fresh crop, including those of a kindly don and a big-hearted jewel thief. Modestly beautiful, sexy, well-educated, martially artistic, private investigator Kate Morgan gets involved when her firm is engaged to clear up its mysteries by the book’s present possessor, jet set sexmeister Cidro Medina. Among those mysteries is the role of the hotheaded dramatist Christopher Marlowe, who seems to have filled with espionage the hours made empty by the closing of the playhouses in Black Plagued London. Marlowe is in the middle of maneuverings for the monarch’s favor by the Earls of Essex and Burghley, dealings that extend to counterfeiting, blackmail, arms smuggling, and off-the-books deals with foreign powers, most of which turn up in their modern forms as Kate travels the globe decoding the scribblings and trying to find out who wants them badly enough to kill for them in this day. Prime suspect is shady megarich art dealer Luca de Tolomei, with whom Kate engages in professional flirtation in sundry glam locales. But as Kate homes in on the solutions, her firm warns her off the case. Unbeknownst (the story is dense with unbeknowing) to Kate, her powerful senator father and her powerful, politically wired boss are deep in the reemergence from Iranian imprisonment of an important double agent. Headstrong Kate will not be put off. Continuing her investigation, she successfully hacks into the Elizabethan encryption and ties the Renaissance treachery to descendants of the evildoers.
Clunkily written (did “OK” really turn up in Tudor parlance?) and overplotted.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-7434-3292-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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
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