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STAYING IN THE GAME

An ungainly mishmash of stilted writing and inexplicable intrigues.

Russian spies hatch convoluted plots for ill-conceived reasons in this murky espionage yarn.

Red’s (Deception License, 2019) potboiler centers on Galina Ivanova, a Russian agent who longs to quit spying and have a baby. First, though, she honeytraps a U.S. senator’s horny son into having anal sex with her, by which contrivance she administers a poison that will kill him unless he flies to Moscow for the antidote. The Kremlin promptly takes him hostage. Galina then turns to her own private vendetta against Doruk, a Turkish intelligence officer and ex-lover who got her to betray Russia in a way that is never clarified. She considers shooting him. She rejects that method of revenge in favor of a byzantine plan to: 1) assist a Russian politician in clearing his name of treason allegations by 2) concocting a false charge of child molestation against him so he can be exonerated of it while 3) getting pregnant by the politician, before 4) having sex with Doruk, sending him pregnancy photos and implying the baby is his. Another subplot explores Doruk’s plan to put a bug in a target’s house by replacing all the pens at his bank branch with bugged pens in hopes that he will absentmindedly take one home. The feverish machinations undertaken by Red’s characters are certainly imaginative and even engrossing, and there are intricate scenes of tradecraft and neurolinguistic programming, which add psychological depth to some scenes. (To gain Galina’s confidence, Inga offers a long, Dostoyevskian backstory of how her narcissistic mother pushed her to become a concert pianist and then sabotaged her career.) But the supercomplex narrative may leave readers feeling like simpler expedients are available to achieve the characters’ ends or that the ends themselves do not merit so many sojourns down blind alleys. (In one bizarre scene, Galina sends her friend Olga hundreds of miles away to Baku to buy a book with a quote that Galina likes but doesn’t tell Olga which book to buy because she doesn’t remember the quote or the book’s title or author, merely the bookshop where she saw it; Olga dutifully returns with books but not the right one.) The novel’s ill-edited prose is often baffling, especially when sex is discussed. (“Galina was able to infect Paul with the poison through bleeding resulting from the deformation in the anal relationship.”) Red sticks lots of aphorisms into the text from writers as far afield as Nietzsche, Kafka, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Janis Joplin, but they seldom illuminate the novel’s themes. For example, the author quotes Einstein, saying, “You have to learn the rules of the game and then to play better than anyone,” which, if authentic, would be the most vacuous truism the physicist ever uttered. The result reads like a le Carré novel merged with Bartlett’s, as rewritten by Jerry Springer and Google translated into Russian and back. Many readers will tire of this game well before the novel stops.

An ungainly mishmash of stilted writing and inexplicable intrigues.

Pub Date: Oct. 30, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-949872-25-5

Page Count: 131

Publisher: Cosmo Publishing

Review Posted Online: Jan. 1, 2020

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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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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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