First-novelist Iverson—an eight-year veteran of sea duty (including deployment to the Persian Gulf in 1987 during the Iran-Iraq war)—writes of Iranian commandos who board and seize an American frigate—and who turn it into a sort of floating truck-bomb. The Americans resist, of course. Okay, so the Iraqi Army was a bit of a fraud. That doesn't mean the Revolutionary Islamic Republic of Iran couldn't field a small force of highly disciplined, fanatical soldiers, spy out the blueprints of a US warship, draw up a complex assault plan, ship the commandos out into the Persian Gulf in a flotilla of rubber boats in the middles of the mother of all sandstorms, sneak the boats up to the midships blind spot of the frigate, swoop onto the bridge and into the Combat Information Center, take over the ship, imprison the entire crew and four visiting journalists, pack the ship's armaments with plastique and aim the ship at the Navy's floating command center in Bahrain where, God willing, both ships will blow to smithereens. It is an awfully tricky plan, but it seems to be working—except that the Iranians have not accounted for American spunk. The small group of men who escaped being welded into their berthing spaces dart about the ship picking off Iranians one by one, and Iranian nerves start to fray. The admiral's staff in Bahrain—for once not a pack of imbeciles—figures out why the on-coming ship has gone silent and why it is headed straight at them at flank speed. Help is on the way... Sufficiently bloody, scary, and exciting to make up for the lovely female journalist who happened to drop in at just the wrong time.
Pub Date: May 1, 1991
ISBN: 0-517-58310-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1991
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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