A mighty entertaining espionage thriller with elements that bring to mind The Magnificent Seven.
An attempt to spy on the rich and powerful takes a deadly turn in Joseph’s (The Wild Card, 2001, etc.) latest thriller.
Every year for more than a century, members of San Francisco’s all-male Bohemian Club, “a veritable bastion of global power and privilege,” have gathered for a midsummer encampment among the redwoods near idyllic Monte Rio on California’s Russian River. This year, four wild and crazy townies, who call themselves “The Russian River Society of Pirates and Thieves,” look forward to their own tradition—using the most advanced technology available to spy on these politicians, CEOs, and other major players as they behave “like the rowdy fraternity boys many of them once were.” It turns out that the Bohemian Club lies in the cross hairs of a Russian cartel that wants revenge on five American oil companies—each one led by a Boho—for fouling up a natural gas pipeline deal. FBI agent Teddy Swan and his partner, Paul Kruger, pay an unexpected visit to the Pirates; he wants them to help the agency in protecting the Bohos from terrorist attack. Also assisting is the Pirates’ favorite local deputy, the motorcycle-riding Officer Alice. After a long-winded preface, Joseph delivers a fun, fast-paced story, filled with diverse characters—some old (such as 70-year-old Butler Rhodes, one of the Pirates and a former sniper in Vietnam), some youngish (30-year-old math teacher Phillip Mercier), and many eccentric or geeky. Along the way, he offers strong descriptions (Rhodes, for example, is “Grizzled, tough as cheap jerky”), and realistic dialogue. It’s unclear exactly why the book is in 2009, however—although it may be to avoid discussion of the current political situation in the United States, or of more cutting-edge spy tech.
A mighty entertaining espionage thriller with elements that bring to mind The Magnificent Seven.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-68433-142-0
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Black Rose Writing
Review Posted Online: Nov. 8, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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