A not surprisingly neat recovery from the over-dense Star Flight (1993), by the empress of old-time cliff-edged suspense. Whitney guides the reader through a new setting (here Harpers Ferry, W.Va., of John Brown fame); and she crowds in enough domestic secrets (and two murders) to hogtie any family. Lacey Elliot, a successful illustrator, was raised by her mother, Amelia, in Virginia, never knowing who or where her father was. But when Amelia, ill after surgery, receives a frightened letter from her great-aunt Vinnie, Lacey goes in her mother's place to Harpers Ferry. There's a veritable explosion of family: Vinnie, the fierce great-grandmother who lives with strong-willed housekeeper Anne- Marie; Aunt Ardra, Amelia's sister; Lacey's half-sister, Carla, and her small son, Egan. Most impressive is the man all seem to fear- -Grandfather Daniel Griffin, a John Brown look-alike with a power beard and a commanding manner. Oh yes, there's drunken Uncle Henry, too, the brother of Lacey's father, Brad—who for some years has been dead as a doornail. Brad, it seems, was the charming rogue who had an affair with Ardra while married to Amelia, thereby producing Carla. It was Daniel, father of Amelia and Ardra, who left town suspected of Brad's murder. On the very offshore island where Brad died, now Uncle Henry will buy the farm. But why is Old Vinnie's cane, found in her garden, covered with blood? While Lacey enjoys the help of nice teacher Ryan, there is a bevy of fess-up talks with family members—and a room in the old house haunted by memories of an old tragedy at the time of the Civil War. Whodunit? Veterans of the Whitney method might guess.
Pub Date: Sept. 14, 1994
ISBN: 0-517-59929-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1994
Back to a Jurassic Park sideshow for another immensely entertaining adventure, this fashioned from the loose ends of Crichton's 1990 bestseller. Six years after the lethal rampage that closed the primordial zoo offshore Costa Rica, there are reports of strange beasts in widely separated Central American venues. Intrigued by the rumors, Richard Levine, a brilliant but arrogant paleontologist, goes in search of what he hopes will prove a lost world. Aided by state-of- the-art equipment, Levine finds a likely Costa Rican outpostbut quickly comes to grief, having disregarded the warnings of mathematician Ian Malcolm (the sequel's only holdover character). Malcolm and engineer Doc Thorne organize a rescue mission whose ranks include mechanical whiz Eddie Carr and Sarah Harding, a biologist doing fieldwork with predatory mammals in East Africa. The party of four is unexpectedly augmented by two children, Kelly Curtis, a 13-year-old "brainer," and Arby Benton, a black computer genius, age 11. Once on the coastal island, the deliverance crew soon links up with an unchastened Levine and locates the hush-hush genetics lab complex used to stock the ill- fated Jurassic Park with triceratops, tyrannosaurs, velociraptors, etc. Meanwhile, a mad amoral scientist and his own group, in pursuit of extinct creatures for biotech experiments, have also landed on the mysterious island. As it turns out, the prehistoric fauna is hostile to outsiders, and so the good guys as well as their malefic counterparts spend considerable time running through the triple-canopy jungle in justifiable terror. The far-from-dumb brutes exact a gruesomely heavy toll before the infinitely resourceful white-hat interlopers make their final breakout. Pell-mell action and hairbreadth escapes, plus periodic commentary on the uses and abuses of science: the admirable Crichton keeps the pot boiling throughout.
Pub Date: Sept. 28, 1995
ISBN: 0-679-41946-2
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1995
PLB 0-688-13166-2 King Midas And The Golden Touch ($16.00; PLB $15.63; Apr.; 32 pp.; 0-688-13165-4; PLB 0-688-13166-2): The familiar tale of King Midas gets the golden touch in the hands of Craft and Craft (Cupid and Psyche, 1996). The author takes her inspiration from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s retelling, capturing the essence of the tale with the use of pithy dialogue and colorful description. Enchanting in their own right, the illustrations summon the Middle Ages as a setting, and incorporate colors so lavish that when they are lost to the uniform gold spurred by King Midas’s touch, the point of the story is further burnished. (Picture book. 7-9)
Pub Date: April 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-688-13165-4
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1999
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