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
This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana.
The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense.
This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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
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