Witty and glib, with a cliffhanger ending that seems contrived.
Cleage (Some Things I Never Thought I’d Do, 2003, etc.) returns to Atlanta’s West End in this comedy-tinged thriller.
Catherine “Cat” Sanderson is one of many empowered single mothers living in the district. Her consulting business, Babylon Sisters, is thriving, and her teenaged daughter, Phoebe, is off to private boarding school for her senior year. So far, Cat has managed to deflect Phoebe’s insistent questions about her father by planting imagined lovers with real names in college-era diaries concocted to throw Phoebe off the scent. But this scheme backfires when Phoebe demands DNA tests from all the red herrings. Meanwhile, Cat has been recruited by the dulcet-voiced Sam Hall to work for Ezola Mandeville, once a maid, now a maid-service mogul whose company somehow makes a profit while managing to raise the domestic workers it employs out of poverty. Ezola wants to expand her operation to include immigrant and refugee women, a cause Cat embraces because her friend Amelia, a successful lawyer and lap-swimmer, has called on her to help Miriam, a Haitian exile whose sister Etienne has been abducted into sex slavery. But Sam’s “greed-is-good” cynicism has aroused Cat’s suspicions, and her life is further unsettled by the reappearance of Phoebe’s father, renowned foreign correspondent Burghardt Johnson (“B.J.”). Eighteen years before, B.J. left Cat on the eve of her abortion that never was. Now, he’s lending by-line cachet to the Sentinel, a historic African-American paper fallen on hard times. The editor and founder’s son, Louis, is Cat’s best childhood friend and Phoebe’s godfather. The Sentinel launches a series of exposés of a sinister syndicate trafficking in illegal aliens for cut-rate big box cleaning contracts and forced prostitution. B.J.’s investigation links Sam to the slumlord who houses the immigrants, and an attempt to enlist Ezola’s aid proves disastrous when Cat learns, too late, that Mandeville Maid Services really is too good to be true.
Witty and glib, with a cliffhanger ending that seems contrived.Pub Date: April 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-345-45609-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Thriller fans will delight in this latest escapade. Cussler and co-author Burcell have delivered a winner.
The 10th and latest Sam and Remi Fargo adventure (The Romanov Ransom, 2017, etc.) is a fast-paced tale that reaches back to the early days of automotive glory.
In Manchester, England, in 1906, the Gray Ghost has gone missing. That’s the Rolls-Royce prototype developed by Charles Rolls and Henry Royce, and the loss threatens to financially ruin them. They hire a detective to locate it, but he is murdered. In the present day, Sam and Remi Fargo hear about the car, which turned up after World War II but is now missing again. It's always been owned by the Payton family, which generations ago was the Oren-Payton family, and may be worth many millions of dollars. Raising the stakes even higher, the 1906 thieves may have hidden treasure inside the car, though there was no trace of it when the Gray Ghost was found after the war. But jealous modern-day cousin Arthur Oren has the car stolen and then loses track of it—has the thief he hired stolen it twice? It’s a complicated and clever plot, with Sam and Remi trying to find it for the current owner, Lord Albert Payton, Viscount Wellswick. The 1906 journal of Jonathon Payton, fifth Viscount Wellswick, provides a solid backstory. The Fargos are great series characters, whip-smart and altruistic self-made multimillionaires who can afford to take time from their charity work to dabble in dangerous adventures. Oren knows they’re involved, and he wants them both dead and the car returned. An accomplice suggests first making the Fargos destitute by freezing their bank accounts and credit cards. Then the bad guys can arrange a fake suicide. It’s fun to watch Sam and Remi get out of dicey scrapes, once by driving an Ahrens-Fox pumper fire engine out of a blazing building. Oren asks, “How hard is it to knock off two socialites?” He finds out the hard way; he should have just acquainted himself with Cussler’s series.
Thriller fans will delight in this latest escapade. Cussler and co-author Burcell have delivered a winner.Pub Date: May 29, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-7352-1873-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: April 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2018
Bulky, balky, talky.
In an updated quest for the Holy Grail, the narrative pace remains stuck in slo-mo.
But is the Grail, in fact, holy? Turns out that’s a matter of perspective. If you’re a member of that most secret of clandestine societies, the Priory of Sion, you think yes. But if your heart belongs to the Roman Catholic Church, the Grail is more than just unholy, it’s downright subversive and terrifying. At least, so the story goes in this latest of Brown’s exhaustively researched, underimagined treatise-thrillers (Deception Point, 2001, etc.). When Harvard professor of symbology Robert Langdon—in Paris to deliver a lecture—has his sleep interrupted at two a.m., it’s to discover that the police suspect he’s a murderer, the victim none other than Jacques Saumière, esteemed curator of the Louvre. The evidence against Langdon could hardly be sketchier, but the cops feel huge pressure to make an arrest. And besides, they don’t particularly like Americans. Aided by the murdered man’s granddaughter, Langdon flees the flics to trudge the Grail-path along with pretty, persuasive Sophie, who’s driven by her own need to find answers. The game now afoot amounts to a scavenger hunt for the scholarly, clues supplied by the late curator, whose intent was to enlighten Sophie and bedevil her enemies. It’s not all that easy to identify these enemies. Are they emissaries from the Vatican, bent on foiling the Grail-seekers? From Opus Dei, the wayward, deeply conservative Catholic offshoot bent on foiling everybody? Or any one of a number of freelancers bent on a multifaceted array of private agendas? For that matter, what exactly is the Priory of Sion? What does it have to do with Leonardo? With Mary Magdalene? With (gulp) Walt Disney? By the time Sophie and Langdon reach home base, everything—well, at least more than enough—has been revealed.
Bulky, balky, talky.Pub Date: March 18, 2003
ISBN: 0-385-50420-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2003
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
