It’s no Raiders of the Lost Ark, but it’s a pleasant-enough diversion.
Solzhenitsyn meets Dan Brown...sort of.
Deep in the boreal forests of Siberia, conveniently close to one of Stalin’s Gulag camps, lies a cave, and within it an unusual sight: “where it had always been, set into the wall: an ancient altar made out of human bones.” The attraction? Well, things happen before that altar that are downright miraculous, the kind of things that might attract miracle-seekers and power-thirsty types along the lines of that Nazi archaeologist in the first Indiana Jones movie. Naturally, bad things ensue, not least the disappearance of the last “Keeper” at the hands of a very bad NKVD agent, Nikolai Popov, “one tough bastard,” who exults that the cave’s contents are “more valuable than diamonds, more valuable than any make-believe chest of Romanov gold.” Of course: It would never do for a pussycat to be a stone cold commie killer, never do for a secret treasure to be anything less than splendid—or, at any rate worth more than a pretend treasure, whatever that means. Fast-forward 70 years, and now it’s the job of San Francisco legal eagle Zoe Dmitroff and her newfound pal Ry O’Malley, both resourceful and tough as nails, to figure out the altar’s secret even as bad guys—and one notably bad girl, bloody breasts and all—close in. Guess who wins? That part’s easy; it’s figuring out what Marilyn Monroe has to do with the proceedings that might make your head hurt. Carter—a pseudonym, the publisher promises, for “an internationally renowned author”—tells a competent and action-filled story, if one without much attention to detail. (Russians don’t speak with burrs, for instance, unless they’re Sean Connery in the film version of The Hunt for Red October.) There’s lots of sex, lots of violence, lots of meaningful glances across the room and lots of plot twists—all the requisites, in other words, of a by-the-numbers thriller.
It’s no Raiders of the Lost Ark, but it’s a pleasant-enough diversion.Pub Date: March 18, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4391-9908-4
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2011
Though Eggers strives for a portentous, Orwellian tone, this book mostly feels scolding, a Kurt Vonnegut novel rewritten by...
A massive feel-good technology firm takes an increasingly totalitarian shape in this cautionary tale from Eggers (A Hologram for the King, 2012, etc.).
Twenty-four-year-old Mae feels like the luckiest person alive when she arrives to work at the Circle, a California company that’s effectively a merger of Google, Facebook, Twitter and every other major social media tool. Though her job is customer-service drudgework, she’s seduced by the massive campus and the new technologies that the “Circlers” are working on. Those typically involve increased opportunities for surveillance, like the minicameras the company wants to plant everywhere, or sophisticated data-mining tools that measure every aspect of human experience. (The number of screens at Mae’s workstation comically proliferate as new monitoring methods emerge.) But who is Mae to complain when the tools reduce crime, politicians allow their every move to be recorded, and the campus cares for her every need, even providing health care for her ailing father? The novel reads breezily, but it’s a polemic that’s thick with flaws. Eggers has to intentionally make Mae a dim bulb in order for readers to suspend disbelief about the Circle’s rapid expansion—the concept of privacy rights are hardly invoked until more than halfway through. And once they are invoked, the novel’s tone is punishingly heavy-handed, particularly in the case of an ex of Mae's who wants to live off the grid and warns her of the dehumanizing consequences of the Circle’s demand for transparency in all things. (Lest that point not be clear, a subplot involves a translucent shark that’s terrifyingly omnivorous.) Eggers thoughtfully captured the alienation new technologies create in his previous novel, A Hologram for the King, but this lecture in novel form is flat-footed and simplistic.
Though Eggers strives for a portentous, Orwellian tone, this book mostly feels scolding, a Kurt Vonnegut novel rewritten by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-385-35139-3
Page Count: 504
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2013
SEEN & HEARD
This thriller aims right for the heart and never lets go.
A tense thriller explores the bond between sisters and family dynamics that give new meaning to the term “dysfunctional.”
Three years ago, 17-year-old Emma Tanner and her 15-year-old sister, Cassandra, left home, disappearing into the night; as Walker's (All Is Not Forgotten, 2016, etc.) book opens, Cass shows up at her family’s house—without Emma. Dr. Abby Walker of the FBI, a forensic psychiatrist who’s been on the case from the beginning, is desperate to find out what happened and to find Emma before it’s too late. Cass tells Abby she and Emma had been arguing the night they took off and that it soon became obvious that Emma was packing up to leave. Cass, hoping to get her sister in trouble, hid in the car when Emma drove off, heading to the beach, where she was met by a man and woman Cass didn't recognize. When Cass revealed herself, they decided to take her with them as they left for a remote island off the coast of Maine. Emma was pregnant, Cass says, and the couple had offered to help her, but what they really had planned was to keep the baby for themselves. Cass finally managed to escape, she says, but without Emma. It’s a harrowing tale, and Cass says all she wants is to find Emma, but Abby suspects she's hiding something. Cass’ first-person narrative, interspersed with Abby’s investigation, paints a shocking picture of Cass’ ordeal and her family’s disturbing history. Her mother, Judy Martin, has always used her beauty and charm to manipulate her family, and her girls had to flatter her to win her affection. She was jealous of the attention given to her beautiful daughters, which threatened her fragile ego, and she was always scheming to get what she wanted—even seducing her stepson, Hunter, who was obsessed with Emma. Cass is a survivor, forced to become an adult very quickly, and readers will root for her as she tells her disturbing story and looks back on what could have been, when hope was all she and Emma had.
This thriller aims right for the heart and never lets go.Pub Date: Aug. 8, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-250-14143-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2017
© 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.
