AMBROSE BIERCE AND THE ONE-EYED JACKS

Name: AMBROSE BIERCE AND THE ONE-EYED JACKS
Author: Oakley Hall
ISBN: 0-670-03180-1

by Oakley Hall ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 27, 2003

Veteran Hall (Ambrose Bierce and the Death of Kings, 2001, etc.) provides some nice 1891 flavor, but the result, as Hearst...

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San Francisco Examiner columnist Ambrose Bierce may be a tough act to upstage, but here Hall finds a counterweight hiding in plain sight: heroically self-absorbed Examiner publisher William Randolph Hearst, whose current mistress, Winifred Sweet, is beset on two sides. The Sam Yups and Feng Yups, currently battling for supremacy in the city’s tong wars, are threatening reprisals for her Examiner columns as “Annie Laurie” about the plight of young Chinese women sold into sexual slavery. And someone’s threatened her more intimately by murdering Jasper Billings, the photographer Hearst had commissioned to take a series of motion studies that presage the invention of motion pictures, and stealing a dozen photos of splendidly nude Winnie in motion. Enter Bierce and his sidekick and Boswell Tom Redmond, who’s been accompanying missionary Eliza Lindley on her rounds among San Francisco’s most desperate to get material for the Annie Laurie stories he’s been writing under Winnie’s byline. Tom will find plenty of action, since the trail of the missing photos leads through three more murders, Eliza’s decorous bed, and her much less decorous past with Harvard-educated slaver Frank Stone. It’s Hearst and Bierce, two most unlikely guardians of virtue, who are muffled and underemployed here, since the stink of scandal is so pungent that there’s precious little for America’s most cynical journalist and his megalomaniac boss to uncover.

Veteran Hall (Ambrose Bierce and the Death of Kings, 2001, etc.) provides some nice 1891 flavor, but the result, as Hearst himself aptly sputters, is “not Examiner journalism!”

Pub Date: Jan. 27, 2003

ISBN: 0-670-03180-1

Page Count: 216

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2002

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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SO MANY DOORS
by Oakley Hall

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LOVE AND WAR IN CALIFORNIA
by Oakley Hall

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AMBROSE BIERCE AND THE ACE OF SHOOTS
by Oakley Hall

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WITHOUT FAIL

From the Jack Reacher series , Vol. 6

by Lee Child ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 2001

Relentlessly suspenseful and unexpectedly timely: just the thing for Dick Cheney’s bedside reading wherever he’s keeping...

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When the newly elected Vice President’s life is threatened, the Secret Service runs to nomadic soldier-of-fortune Jack Reacher (Echo Burning, 2001, etc.) in this razor-sharp update of The Day of the Jackal and In the Line of Fire that’s begging to be filmed.

Why Reacher? Because M.E. Froelich, head of the VP’s protection team, was once a colleague and lover of his late brother Joe, who’d impressed her with tales of Jack’s derring-do as an Army MP. Now Froelich and her Brooks Brothers–tailored boss Stuyvesant have been receiving a series of anonymous messages threatening the life of North Dakota Senator/Vice President–elect Brook Armstrong. Since the threats may be coming from within the Secret Service’s own ranks—if they aren’t, it’s hard to see how they’ve been getting delivered—they can’t afford an internal investigation. Hence the call to Reacher, who wastes no time in hooking up with his old friend Frances Neagley, another Army vet turned private eye, first to see whether he can figure out a way to assassinate Armstrong, then to head off whoever else is trying. It’s Reacher’s matter-of-fact gift to think of everything, from the most likely position a sniper would assume at Armstrong’s Thanksgiving visit to a homeless shelter to the telltale punctuation of one of the threats, and to pluck helpers from the tiny cast who can fill the remaining gaps because they aren’t idiots or stooges. And it’s Child’s gift to keep tightening the screws, even when nothing’s happening except the arrival of a series of unsigned letters, and to convey a sense of the blank impossibility of guarding any public figure from danger day after highly exposed day, and the dedication and heroism of the agents who take on this daunting job.

Relentlessly suspenseful and unexpectedly timely: just the thing for Dick Cheney’s bedside reading wherever he’s keeping himself these days.

Pub Date: May 1, 2001

ISBN: 0-399-14861-2

Page Count: 384

Publisher: Putnam

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2002

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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THE SECRET
by Lee Child & Andrew Child

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NO PLAN B
by Lee Child & Andrew Child

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BETTER OFF DEAD
by Lee Child & Andrew Child

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THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

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The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.