Kill George Elgin's kid with an experimental drug and the morally numb Vietnam vet stops at nothing to exact his revenge. In his third thriller, ex-NYPD cop Grant (Officer Down, 1993) paints broadly: a white hat for the good guy, a black hat for the bad guy, with a Manhattan office tower at stake. The bad guy nearly steals the show. Michael Devlin, the new head of corporate security for Taggert Industries and an ex-cop himself, has all the resources money can buy to protect CEO Jason Taggert atop his 40-story fortress. Goaded in the boardroom and bedroom by Taggert's ruthless ``right-hand woman'' in charge of experimental drugs, Devlin hires professional security guards and off-duty former colleagues from the NYPD's elite TAC team to fend off crazed assassin Elgin. As Elgin closes in, Devlin readies every state-of-the-art gizmo from customized encryption software to elevators opened only by palm prints. He brings in a team of computer whizzes: a faux-Rasta giant of a black ex-con and a foul-mouthed computer hacker who happens to be the widow of Devlin's ex-partner. Can they get all 40 stories of their electronic fortress de-bugged in time to keep their security systems safe from Elgin? Problem is, George Elgin hacks into computers almost as well as he hacks up humans. Over three weeks, the body count approaches double figures, some of it imaginatively (Elgin is partial to dismemberment), and his ingenuity, courage, loyalty, tenacity, and deep but twisted sense of justice drive him almost to success against overwhelming odds. The full-bore action rises into a ludicrous made-for-Bruce-Willis climax on the 40th floor. Did it never occur to any of the top cops in the moonlighting TAC team that investigating George Elgin is their on- duty job, too? Don't read here for plausibility; Grant has the all the technical details right, but they go with a by-the-numbers plot as relentless as an elevator with every button pushed.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-06-017640-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1995
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
Genetically engineered dinosaurs run amok in Crichton's new, vastly entertaining science thriller. From the introduction alone—a classically Crichton-clear discussion of the implications of biotechnological research—it's evident that the Harvard M.D. has bounced back from the science-fantasy silliness of Sphere (1987) for another taut reworking of the Frankenstein theme, as in The Andromeda Strain and The Terminal Man. Here, Dr. Frankenstein is aging billionaire John Hammond, whose monster is a manmade ecosystem based on a Costa Rican island. Designed as the world's ultimate theme park, the ecosystem boasts climate and flora of the Jurassic Age and—most spectacularly—15 varieties of dinosaurs, created by elaborate genetic engineering that Crichton explains in fascinating detail, rich with dino-lore and complete with graphics. Into the park, for a safety check before its opening, comes the novel's band of characters—who, though well drawn, double as symbolic types in this unsubtle morality play. Among them are hero Alan Grant, noble paleontologist; Hammond, venal and obsessed; amoral dino-designer Henry Wu; Hammond's two innocent grandchildren; and mathematician Ian Malcolm, who in long diatribes serves as Crichton's mouthpiece to lament the folly of science. Upon arrival, the visitors tour the park; meanwhile, an industrial spy steals some dino embryos by shutting down the island's power—and its security grid, allowing the beasts to run loose. The bulk of the remaining narrative consists of dinos—ferocious T. Rex's, voracious velociraptors, venom-spitting dilophosaurs—stalking, ripping, and eating the cast in fast, furious, and suspenseful set-pieces as the ecosystem spins apart. And can Grant prevent the dinos from escaping to the mainland to create unchecked havoc? Though intrusive, the moralizing rarely slows this tornado-paced tale, a slick package of info-thrills that's Crichton's most clever since Congo (1980)—and easily the most exciting dinosaur novel ever written. A sure-fire best-seller.
Pub Date: Nov. 7, 1990
ISBN: 0394588169
Page Count: 424
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1990
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