Jennings is still no threat to Christopher Buckley, and he’s a little too long-winded, but amusing.
The heroes from Jennings’s whimsical 2005 Nam-A-Rama pop up in mid-1970s Mexico, where the president’s life is on the line and the world’s prostitutes have revolution on the brain.
Jack Armstrong is again the straight man in this peppy and cynically cheerful look at what could happen if the whores ran the bordello. Now working for the CIA, Armstrong is the temporary officer in charge of the CIA office at Mexico City’s American embassy, but he’s about to be replaced by Major Crenshaw, a fanatical Catholic who has just arrived in town riding on a burro ready to implement a bizarre personal agenda. Also just arriving is Jack’s relentlessly droll chum Gearhardt, who has at last acquired a first name: “Pepe,” as the many ladies of the evening who populate the great city insist on calling him. Jack is pleased but plenty surprised to see his old chum. Gearhardt was said to have died three years ago, and life’s been lonely without him. Life’s also been simpler. Gearhardt complicates everything and explains nothing. For example, he fails to explain why Marta, the gorgeous and spectacularly endowed Cuban lass he installs in Jack’s apartment, spends her every waking hour in the nude. Or why she has a pistol strapped to her thigh. Nor does he explain believably why it would be a really good idea for Jack to talk a thuggish acquaintance of Marta’s into shooting the president of Mexico at the city’s Cinco de Mayo celebration. The story that finally emerges has to do with a plot to blame Cuba for the assassination, thereby opening the island to legitimate invasion. Well, that’s one explanation. Poor Jack gets dragged all over central Mexico as details emerge. Eventually, he comes to understand that Gearhardt has become the ally of the world’s prostitutes and has in mind a sort of Zionist solution for them.
Jennings is still no threat to Christopher Buckley, and he’s a little too long-winded, but amusing.Pub Date: April 3, 2007
ISBN: 0-765-31661-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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