This chick-lit thriller lacks finesse but never stops throwing colorful subplots at you and never lets up the pace.
A feisty Manhattan attorney struggles against drug thugs and a dangerous attraction to a hunky FBI agent.
In the middle of the night, federal prosecutor Melanie Vargas is called to a grim murder scene. Wealthy teen Whitney Seward’s been found dead of an overdose in her Park Avenue bedroom along with her best friend Brianna Meyers. Melanie suspects that Carmen Reyes, a third girl recently seen with them, may hold the key to the mystery. But she doesn’t know that studious Carmen, whose father Luis, the building’s superintendent, pressed her into Whitney’s fast crowd, is being held captive by an unidentified kidnapper. Headmistress Patricia Andover, at the exclusive school the three girls attended, offers full cooperation, but starchy lawyer Ted Siebert balks at every turn. Meanwhile, Patricia is secretly having an affair with Whitney’s stepfather James and is extorting money from the school to boot. Whitney’s alcoholic mother Caroline is often drunk and may have been home at the time of her daughter’s death. Brianna’s boyfriend Trevor eagerly goes undercover, to the discomfort of Melanie, who thinks he’s a loose cannon. If these and other crosscurrents make the case complex for Melanie, her personal life raises the bar. She’s recently separated from her philandering husband Steve and raising a baby daughter alone. The FBI assigns Dan O’Reilly, the agent Melanie nearly fell into bed with during a previous assignment (Most Wanted, 2005), whose clueless sidekick Bridget also seems to have the hots for him. When forensic evidence points to foul play, the investigating team, helped by Melanie’s sis Linda, a trendy entertainment reporter, gets access to Screen, the club where Whitney’s dealer hung out. The trail takes Melanie and company to Puerto Rico, leaving Trevor behind in mortal danger.
This chick-lit thriller lacks finesse but never stops throwing colorful subplots at you and never lets up the pace.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-072400-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The jaws are those of a shark which makes quick work of a pretty young woman on the Long Island shore (Amity) where the disaster is kept quiet in the (financial) interest of the town's summer rentals. This is no longer possible after the next victim—a youngster—and police chief Brody is wrongly blamed for not closing the beaches sconer. He has other troubles — namely a restless young wife who remembers better days playing country club tennis and she is not immune to a visiting ichthyologist, the only one fascinated by the local shark. The finale entails some ugly, lashing action against the big one that's been getting away and all of it is designed to jolt that maneating masculine readership who probably won't notice that it ""should of"" been better written.
Pub Date: Jan. 18, 1973
ISBN: 978-0-345-54414-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: July 2, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1973
Detail-packed, uninhibitedly discursive, with dollops of heavy-handed humor, and set forth in the author’s usual...
Stephenson’s prodigious new yarn (after The Diamond Age, 1995, etc.) whirls from WWII cryptography and top-secret bullion shipments to a present-day quest by computer whizzes to build a data haven amid corporate shark-infested waters, by way of multiple present-tense narratives overlaid with creeping paranoia.
In 1942, phenomenally talented cryptanalyst Lawrence Waterhouse is plucked from the ruins of Pearl Harbor and posted to Bletchley Park, England, center of Allied code-breaking operations. Problem: having broken the highest German and Japanese codes, how can the Allies use the information without revealing by their actions that the codes have been broken? Enter US Marine Raider Bobby Shaftoe, specialist in cleanup details, statistical adjustments, and dirty jobs. In the present, meanwhile, Waterhouse’s grandson, the computer-encryption whiz Randy, tries to set up a data haven in Southeast Asia, one secure from corporate rivals, nosy governments, and inquisitive intelligence services. He teams up with Shaftoe’s stunning granddaughter, Amy, while pondering mysterious, e-mails from root@eruditorum.org, who’s developed a weird but effective encoding algorithm. Everything, of course, eventually links together. During WWII, Waterhouse and Shaftoe investigate a wrecked U-boat, discovering a consignment of Chinese gold bars, and sheets of a new, indecipherable code. Code-named Arethusa, this material ends up with Randy, presently beset by enemies like his sometime backer, The Dentist. He finds himself in a Filipino jail accused of drug smuggling, along with Shaftoe’s old associate, Enoch Root (root@eruditorum.org!). Since his jailers give him his laptop back, he knows someone’s listening. So he uses his computing skills to confuse the eavesdroppers, decodes Arethusa, and learns the location of a huge hoard of gold looted from Asia by the Japanese.
Detail-packed, uninhibitedly discursive, with dollops of heavy-handed humor, and set forth in the author’s usual vainglorious style; still, there’s surprisingly little actual plot. And the huge chunks of baldly technical material might fascinate NSA chiefs, computer nerds, and budding entrepreneurs, but ordinary readers are likely to balk: showtime, with lumps.Pub Date: May 4, 1999
ISBN: 0-380-97346-4
Page Count: 928
Publisher: Avon/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1999
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