It doesn’t spoil the suspense of this historical fiction to know which side wins.
Germany makes a last-gasp attempt to defeat the Allies and change the course of history, in the latest from Frost (The Six Messiahs, 1995, etc.).
In the winter of 1944, when most Nazi military leaders believe defeat is near, Hitler has Lieutenant Colonel Otto Skorzeny launch a brazen plan. He recruits a secret brigade of 2,000 men, all of whom speak English and are conversant in American culture, to penetrate the enemy’s defenses and lay the groundwork for a final attack. The next step involves an elite corps of 20 soldiers within that brigade, those most capable of passing as American soldiers and striking at the heart of the Allied braintrust. Only their leader, the ruthless SS officer Erich Von Leinsdorf, knows (along with the reader) who their assassination target is and how they will proceed. Von Leinsdorf’s chief aide in this secret mission is Private Bernard Oster, raised in Brooklyn before returning to his homeland with his German parents, and a soldier well versed in the American vernacular Von Leinsdorf will need for the scheme to succeed. Yet from the start, Oster displays divided loyalties, leaving the reader to wonder where his allegiance will ultimately lie as the mission turns increasingly deadly. Though much of the dialogue sounds recycled from black-and-white war movies, Frost opts for moral ambiguity over the standard heroes-and-villains clichés. As the narrative humanizes some of the German soldiers, it details the corruption of black-market American profiteers, resulting in alliances that further complicate fidelities. Ultimately, the plot turns into a game of two-on-two, as Earl Grannit, a New York police investigator before enlisting, and his more innocent sidekick, Ole Carlson, discover the Nazi plan and do their best to thwart it.
It doesn’t spoil the suspense of this historical fiction to know which side wins.Pub Date: May 15, 2007
ISBN: 1-4013-0222-X
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2007
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
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
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