An intriguing and effective political thriller about a complex global threat.
In this debut novel, political unrest in Quebec becomes the linchpin in an international conspiracy involving France, Middle Eastern financiers, terrorists, and people close to Canada’s ruling elite.
Although many in the United States focus on security at the Mexican crossing, the Canadian boundary is the world’s longest border undefended militarily. Currie imagines a scenario in which this intermittently porous border allows the entry of some nefarious characters. He also considers the strategic importance of the world’s second largest country to the Arctic oil drilling regions. The intricate plotting commences with a meeting of select members of the Canadian government in Ottawa to discuss an upcoming referendum about Quebec’s secession. In reality, two such referendums have failed in previous decades. In this unspecified year, the author presupposes a third attempt by Quebec to gain sovereignty. The meeting ends abruptly when Defense Minister Andrew Fraser, accompanied by his mercurial Francophone wife, receives news of four deadly bombs exploding in apparently random sites around Montreal. Suspicion immediately falls on the separatists, known for prior acts of violence. But with no one taking credit for the attacks, and the peculiar choice of targets, Fraser and his old college friend Mark Rayberg, now on staff at the U.S. National Security Council, try to “connect the dots” as other acts of violence and mysterious incidents occur. The absorbing scenes rotate over a four-month period among Fraser and others in Ottawa and Montreal, Rayberg in Washington, D.C., the president of France and some advisers in Paris, and the Canadian Eastern Townships, which border the U.S. The tension is effectively built with the repeated references to the dates and the sense of impending violence. But the pacing is sometimes impeded by the shifting of locations and characters as well as the explanations of politics and financial dealings in Canada and France. Still, the author possesses keen insights into the affairs of state and injects both bias and humor into his characters at points, including a senior adviser to the French president observing: “The United States basically doesn’t speak anything but English, and, some would say, that none too well.”
An intriguing and effective political thriller about a complex global threat.Pub Date: Sept. 25, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-9966216-0-1
Page Count: 328
Publisher: Berwick Books
Review Posted Online: June 18, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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