A third historical series from the author who, as P.C. Doherty, created scholar-rogue Matthew Janklyn and the clerk-spy Hugh Corbett now introduces Sir Roger Shallot, in his dotage and recounting his past exploits—some wily, others lecherous, most dishonest. Here, Shallot and his old school-chum/protector Ben are asked to interrogate Selkirk, now imprisoned in the Tower, and discover information vital to the return of Queen Margaret to Scotland. But Selkirk is soon murdered in his locked-from-the- inside cell (with a white rose mysteriously appearing by his side), and three more will die before Shallot—assassins dogging him both in England and in France as he learns of various treacheries, conspiracies, marital infidelities—can untangle the English, French, and Scottish line of successions. Shallot's bluster (he claims to have bedded Elizabeth I, offered plot ideas to Shakespeare, etc.) seems more force-fed ``history'' than genuine characterization, and these asides, always cut short by ``that's another story,'' become extremely irritating. Atogether, then, Shallot is far less interesting than that scamp Janklyn and medieval mole Corbett.
Pub Date: March 23, 1993
ISBN: 0-312-08920-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1993
The fine Israeli writer Yehoshua (Open Heart, 1996, etc.) makes a lengthy journey into the year 999, the end of the first millennium. Indeed, it is the idea of a great journey that is the heart of the story here. Ben Attar, a Moroccan Jewish merchant has come a long distance to France to seek out his nephew and former partner Abulafia. Ben Attar, the nephew, and a third partner, the Muslim Abu Lutfi, had once done a lucrative business importing spices and treasures from the Atlas Mountains to eager buyers in medieval Europe. But now their partnership has been threatened by a complex series of events, with Abulafia married to a pious Jewish widow who objects vehemently to Ben Attar’s two wives. Accompanied by a Spanish rabbi, whose cleverness is belied by his seeming ineffectualness; the rabbi’s young son, Abu Lutfi; the two wives; a timorous black slave boy, and a crew of Arab sailors, the merchant has come to Europe to fight for his former partnership. The battle takes place in two makeshift courtrooms in the isolated Jewish communities of the French countryside, in scenes depicted with extraordinary vividness. Yehoshua tells this complex, densely layered story of love, sexuality, betrayal and “the twilight days, [when] faiths [are] sharpened in the join between one millennium and the next” in a richly allusive, languorous prose, full of lengthy, packed sentences, with clauses tumbling one after another. De Lange’s translation is sensitively nuanced and elegant, catching the strangely hypnotic rhythms of Yehoshua’s style. As the story draws toward its tragic conclusion—but not the one you might expect—the effect is moving, subtle, at once both cerebral and emotional. One of Yehoshua’s most fully realized works: a masterpiece.
Pub Date: Jan. 19, 1999
ISBN: 0-385-48882-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1998
With only a sliver less suspense, Koontz follows up 1996's Intensity with an afterlife novel about a plane crash. Los Angeles crime reporter Joe Carpenter (ah, those initials) needs resurrecting. One year ago his wife, Michelle, and two daughters, Chrissie and little Nina, actually did die in a devastating plane crash over Colorado: no survivors. In a dive, the plane had rocketed straight into millennial rock, leaving only two pieces larger than a car door. Joe, locked in unbearable grief, has quit work, sold his house, moved to a studio apartment over a garage, and is gnawing himself to death with weight loss. Meetings with a compassionate survivor group haven't helped. Rage and anger with an unjust God in whom Joe doesn't believe takes up all his energy. Then visiting his wife and children's graves, Joe finds Dr. Rose Tucker, a black Asian woman with great presence who's taking Polaroids of his family's burial sites. She tells him she survived the crash! But suddenly two men appear and start shooting at her as she races off. Joe soon finds himself involved in unraveling a suicide plague that has struck relatives of the plane's dead. Rose has taken Polaroids of the graves of other relatives as well—but whoever gets one of her pictures first sees a blissful image of the afterlife, then commits suicide, often horribly. As Joe tracks Rose down, he hears that a little girl survived with her, a girl named Nina. Has mankind reached a turning point, as Dr. Tucker avers, at which science has now proven the existence of the afterlife? Funded by a multibillionaire, a secret but massive scientific effort larger than the Manhattan Project has made fantastic strides in the paranormal and revealed a breakthrough into . . . but some baddies want to use this discovery for their own ends, and thus Joe and Rose—and Nina!—must be killed. Masterfully styled, serious entertainment. These are Koontz's great years. (First printing 600,000; Literary Guild main selection; author tour; radio satellite tour)
Pub Date: Feb. 13, 1997
ISBN: 0-679-42526-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1997
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