Hard-action fans may turn the pages, but others will sense a missed opportunity, especially after the sharp first half.
Disappointing debut thriller sends scientists, the FBI and a hired killer scrambling for Einstein’s last, unpublished theory.
Alpert works from a Hitchcock template that promises a breathtaking cross-country chase in the tradition of Saboteur and North by Northwest. The story takes off when David Swift, a professor and science writer, learns from a dying physicist the details of a theory Einstein left unpublished. Put into action, this “final theory” could lead to the destruction of the universe. A man who knows too much, Swift finds his life imperiled. Terrorists want to know what Swift knows, as does the U.S. government, who sic the FBI on him. Dodging the Bureau boys and their tactics, which equal the Gestapo’s in violence and treachery, Swift heads to Princeton to uncover the full details of Einstein’s theory. There he teams with a former girlfriend and soon they’re off to Carnegie Tech, the hills of Western Pennsylvania, then to West Virginia and Georgia. Alpert sets a brisk pace and laces his lean prose with refreshing wit. Blowsy FBI agent Lucille Parker, a Texan who shoots from the hip, will make a great part for an actress of a certain age and girth should the book ever become a movie. But prospective movie sales may have led the author to the letdown that comes in the book’s second half. After sketching out promising characters and relationships, Alpert, it seems, aims for action-movie fans. As Armageddon draws nigh, he brings on the Delta Force, helicopters and all, for a series of sober, over-the-top action scenes. Alpert’s plotting, meanwhile, turns facile. In particular, he undermines suspense by almost never letting anyone get cornered without a quick escape readily at hand.
Hard-action fans may turn the pages, but others will sense a missed opportunity, especially after the sharp first half.Pub Date: June 6, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4165-7287-9
Page Count: 384
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2008
A crime slowly unmasks a small town’s worth of resentment and yearning.
A hit-and-run in the Mojave Desert dismantles a family and puts a structurally elegant mystery in motion.
In her fourth book, Lalami is in thrilling command of her narrative gifts, reminding readers why The Moor’s Account (2014) was a Pulitzer finalist. Here, she begins in the voice of Nora Guerraoui, a nascent jazz composer, who recalls: "My father was killed on a spring night four years ago, while I sat in the corner booth of a new bistro in Oakland.” She was drinking champagne at the time. Nora’s old middle school band mate, Jeremy Gorecki, an Iraq War veteran beset with insomnia, narrates the next chapter. He hears about the hit-and-run as he reports to work as a deputy sheriff. The third chapter shifts to Efraín Aceves, an undocumented laborer who stops in the dark to adjust his bicycle chain and witnesses the lethal impact. Naturally, he wants no entanglement with law enforcement. With each chapter, the story baton passes seamlessly to a new or returning narrator. Readers hear from Erica Coleman, a police detective with a complacent husband and troubled son; Anderson Baker, a bowling-alley proprietor irritated over shared parking with the Guerraoui’s diner; the widowed Maryam Guerraoui; and even the deceased Driss Guerraoui. Nora’s parents fled political upheaval in Casablanca in 1981, roughly a decade before Lalami left Morocco herself. In the U.S., Maryam says, “Above all, I was surprised by the talk shows, the way Americans loved to confess on television.” The author, who holds a doctorate in linguistics, is precise with language. She notices the subtle ways that words on a diner menu become dated, a match to the décor: “The plates were gray. The water glasses were scratched. The gumball machine was empty.” Nuanced characters drive this novel, and each voice gets its variation: Efraín sarcastic, Nora often argumentative, Salma, the good Guerraoui daughter, speaks with the coiled fury of the duty-bound: “You’re never late, never sick, never rude.” The ending is a bit pat, but Lalami expertly mines an American penchant for rendering the “other.”
A crime slowly unmasks a small town’s worth of resentment and yearning.Pub Date: March 26, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5247-4715-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: Dec. 10, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2019
Detail-packed, uninhibitedly discursive, with dollops of heavy-handed humor, and set forth in the author’s usual...
Stephenson’s prodigious new yarn (after The Diamond Age, 1995, etc.) whirls from WWII cryptography and top-secret bullion shipments to a present-day quest by computer whizzes to build a data haven amid corporate shark-infested waters, by way of multiple present-tense narratives overlaid with creeping paranoia.
In 1942, phenomenally talented cryptanalyst Lawrence Waterhouse is plucked from the ruins of Pearl Harbor and posted to Bletchley Park, England, center of Allied code-breaking operations. Problem: having broken the highest German and Japanese codes, how can the Allies use the information without revealing by their actions that the codes have been broken? Enter US Marine Raider Bobby Shaftoe, specialist in cleanup details, statistical adjustments, and dirty jobs. In the present, meanwhile, Waterhouse’s grandson, the computer-encryption whiz Randy, tries to set up a data haven in Southeast Asia, one secure from corporate rivals, nosy governments, and inquisitive intelligence services. He teams up with Shaftoe’s stunning granddaughter, Amy, while pondering mysterious, e-mails from root@eruditorum.org, who’s developed a weird but effective encoding algorithm. Everything, of course, eventually links together. During WWII, Waterhouse and Shaftoe investigate a wrecked U-boat, discovering a consignment of Chinese gold bars, and sheets of a new, indecipherable code. Code-named Arethusa, this material ends up with Randy, presently beset by enemies like his sometime backer, The Dentist. He finds himself in a Filipino jail accused of drug smuggling, along with Shaftoe’s old associate, Enoch Root (root@eruditorum.org!). Since his jailers give him his laptop back, he knows someone’s listening. So he uses his computing skills to confuse the eavesdroppers, decodes Arethusa, and learns the location of a huge hoard of gold looted from Asia by the Japanese.
Detail-packed, uninhibitedly discursive, with dollops of heavy-handed humor, and set forth in the author’s usual vainglorious style; still, there’s surprisingly little actual plot. And the huge chunks of baldly technical material might fascinate NSA chiefs, computer nerds, and budding entrepreneurs, but ordinary readers are likely to balk: showtime, with lumps.Pub Date: May 4, 1999
ISBN: 0-380-97346-4
Page Count: 928
Publisher: Avon/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1999
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