by Matthew Hunter ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 1, 1992
Hunter (the paperback Comrades) makes his hardcover debut with the familiar story of an ordinary man caught up in the intrigues of international spymasters, a scenario that he makes secondary to the hero's effort to save his faltering marriage and reclaim his estranged wife while struggling with his feelings for a beautiful would-be Russian defector. David Marriner, a British specialist in guns and armour, meets beautiful Svetlana Malinkova, director of the famed Kremlin Armoury museum, at a Brussels conference, and she immediately invites him to visit her in Moscow. British Intelligence agents pressure him to do so, using as an incentive their ability to provide him with Britain's top divorce attorney to fend off the efforts of his wife, Celia, to end their marriage and take away his beloved daughter Katie. They want Marriner to use his contacts with Svetlana to arrange the defection of a Kremlin insider, a proposition she accepts on the condition that she's brought out as well, together with a collection of art treasures she's amassed. Things in Moscow become complicated and risky, but Marriner cannot turn back, realizing too late that his own employers are more than willing to exacerbate his marital problems as a means of insuring his cooperation. Even as Celia begins to show willingness to try again, Marriner finds himself increasingly involved with the more-than- willing Russian beauty. Before everything is resolved, he comes to understand the cynical double-cross in which he is but a pawn and has to endure an unexpected and deadly confrontation back on British soil. An average thriller made somewhat more interesting by the hero's tortured personal dilemma and moral quandary.
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-8027-1211-8
Page Count: 276
Publisher: Walker
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1992
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by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
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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
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by Harper Lee ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 11, 1960
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
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