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OPERATION FANTASY PLAN

Richly written debut spy thriller, with delicious turns and quirks about the CIA's penetration into major international businesses, that ends up merely bloodsoaked. Gilboy, trained as an agent handler by the Defense Intelligence Agency, clearly knows whereof he speaks. Peter Gaines finds himself dismissed by the CIA after 18 years in the field without achieving high position. His cashiering comes about when he's been handed Operation Fantasy Plan in Bangkok, a supremely refined brothel featuring young Thai girls and children kidnapped from around the world. Gaines was supposed to use this brothel to blackmail visiting Japanese scientists and businessmen who use the whorehouse to siphon off tensions created back home. Each room has recording devices, and the Japanese bigwigs have bizarre desires, including mutilation. When a uniquely beautiful Thai virgin, Songkha Chattkatavong, or Song, is recruited to bear the child of a Japanese scientist, Gaines can no longer bear his duty and hopes to help Song escape. But she's sent north for 11 months of sex-training and he's recalled to headquarters in Virginia, where he's essentially fired without severance pay. He takes his savings and returns to Thailand to rescue Song—soon finding himself, however, the object of CIA attentions and under surveillance. He suspects a neighbor, Penny O'Hara, of spying on him, and eventually it turns out that she works for his former roommate and best friend at the Agency Institute, where he was first trained. Gaines at last, by various indirections, makes his way back to the Bangkok brothel and quickly becomes involved in ever more outrÇ activities that force him to kill a Japanese who mutilates girls and then, in search of Song, to go on the run with a Thai girl who may or may not be spying on him. The narrative gets increasingly melodramatic, but le CarrÇ fans will love the bleak Spy Who Came in from the Cold first half.

Pub Date: July 1, 1997

ISBN: 0-688-15246-5

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1997

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THE CATCHER IN THE RYE

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

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MAGIC HOUR

Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.

Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.

Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.

Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.

Pub Date: March 1, 2006

ISBN: 0-345-46752-3

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Ballantine

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005

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