Australian thriller writer Reilly follows up his high-tech adventure Ice Station (1999), this time sending a mild-mannered professor on a breathless, hokey, beat-the-bad-guys hunt for an ancient Inca artifact that could blow apart the planet.
Starting on page one with a hapless French monk whose head explodes “like a watermelon,” the action just keeps on coming. William Race, a translator of ancient languages, is whisked out of his seedy NYU office and put on a US military jet to the Peruvian rainforest, where a gang of brilliantly able scientists (including Race’s former lover) and gruff military personnel are rushing to find an Inca statue that, according to an incomplete copy of a 16th-century manuscript Race can read as if it were a newspaper, was snatched from the clutches of murderous Spanish conquistadors and hidden in an undiscovered temple deep in the jungle. The catlike statue, called the Spirit of the People, was carved from a meteorite that smashed into Peru at the dawn of the Incan empire, and it just might contain a deadly concentration of an extraterrestrial element that, when combined with the latest, easily transportable doomsday technology, could destroy the Earth. At first, Race takes a backseat in most of the action here, watching as a rival bunch of homicidal German commandos fall prey to Indian arrows and monstrous cats. But, as nail-biting stunts, man-eating crocodiles, 11th-hour reversals, and other spectacular calamities reduce Reilly’s cast to a handful, Race learns that the triangular birthmark under his left eye just might be what the Incas believed to be the Mark of the Sun, and that, just like the original Incan prince who saved the statue from Pizarro’s looters, it just might be Race’s destiny to defend it against those who would exploit it for evil ends.
Michael Crichton meets Indiana Jones in a campy, blatantly derivative, nonstop plot-boiler: great, gasping, mindless fun.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2001
ISBN: 0-312-26659-6
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2000
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
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The years pass by at a fast and steamy clip in Blume’s latest adult novel (Wifey, not reviewed; Smart Women, 1984) as two friends find loyalties and affections tested as they grow into young women. In sixth grade, when Victoria Weaver is asked by new girl Caitlin Somers to spend the summer with her on Martha’s Vineyard, her life changes forever. Victoria, or more commonly Vix, lives in a small house; her brother has muscular dystrophy; her mother is unhappy, and money is scarce. Caitlin, on the other hand, lives part of the year with her wealthy mother Phoebe, who’s just moved to Albuquerque, and summers with her father Lamb, equally affluent, on the Vineyard. The story of how this casual invitation turns the two girls into what they call "Summer sisters" is prefaced with a prologue in which Vix is asked by Caitlin to be her matron of honor. The years in between are related in brief segments by numerous characters, but mostly by Vix. Caitlin, determined never to be ordinary, is always testing the limits, and in adolescence falls hard for Von, an older construction worker, while Vix falls for his friend Bru. Blume knows the way kids and teens speak, but her two female leads are less credible as they reach adulthood. After high school, Caitlin travels the world and can’t understand why Vix, by now at Harvard on a scholarship and determined to have a better life than her mother has had, won’t drop out and join her. Though the wedding briefly revives Vix’s old feelings for Bru, whom Caitlin is marrying, Vix is soon in love with Gus, another old summer friend, and a more compatible match. But Caitlin, whose own demons have been hinted at, will not be so lucky. The dark and light sides of friendship breathlessly explored in a novel best saved for summer beachside reading.
Pub Date: May 8, 1998
ISBN: 0-385-32405-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1998
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
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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. 22, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
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