by Randy Singer ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 15, 2007
A rousing opening degenerates into a routine legal thriller.
The hunt for a code that would end the Internet as we know it pits three spunky law students against an unscrupulous FBI and vicious Chinese gangsters.
Squeaky-clean Christian thriller-writer Singer teases with a fast-moving, semi-zany opening section in which repo-man David Hoffman, working his jittery trade in Vegas, learns that he has 48 hours to locate Professor Dagan, whose Abacus Algorithm easily undoes the Internet’s most deeply imbedded security safeguards. Committed Christian Dagan planned to sell his secret to the world’s three most powerful private security firms and send his profits to churches in China, but the buyers were actually Triad gangsters who hold Hoffman’s peppy athletic wife Jessica hostage until they have their hands on that handy algorithm. Hoffman flounders for a few seconds, but comes up with a strategy in which he pledges every cent he has plus some he doesn’t to get information about Dagan from the local and well-informed community of bail bondsmen and repo-people and, within the deadline, he’s got his man. Then, in the handover of Dagan, the noble professor has to sacrifice himself to keep the Hoffmans alive. Cut to Atlanta, where the action bogs. Laser-focused third-year law student Jamie Brock and her Criminal Procedure classmates—studly, flamboyant, African-American Isaiah Washington and brilliant, nerdy, prodigy Wellington Farnsworth—have to endure the tiresome Socratic teaching methods of pudgy ex-Californian super-attorney-turned-professor Walter Snead. Snead, whose reputation is as unpleasant as his classroom manner, is also the supervisor of the legal-aid clinic where Jamie and Isaiah meet the downtrodden, including a client who doesn’t fit the usual profile when he first seeks help from Jamie and then takes it on the lam and disappears. Before you can say “witness protection program,” Jamie, Isaiah and Wellington are surrounded by bad guys, some of whom are so awful they kill a totally blameless Labrador retriever in cold blood!
A rousing opening degenerates into a routine legal thriller.Pub Date: May 15, 2007
ISBN: 1-4000-7334-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: WaterBrook
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2007
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by C.S. Lewis ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1942
These letters from some important executive Down Below, to one of the junior devils here on earth, whose job is to corrupt mortals, are witty and written in a breezy style seldom found in religious literature. The author quotes Luther, who said: "The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn." This the author does most successfully, for by presenting some of our modern and not-so-modern beliefs as emanating from the devil's headquarters, he succeeds in making his reader feel like an ass for ever having believed in such ideas. This kind of presentation gives the author a tremendous advantage over the reader, however, for the more timid reader may feel a sense of guilt after putting down this book. It is a clever book, and for the clever reader, rather than the too-earnest soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1942
ISBN: 0060652934
Page Count: 53
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1943
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by Heather Morris ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 4, 2018
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as...
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An unlikely love story set amid the horrors of a Nazi death camp.
Based on real people and events, this debut novel follows Lale Sokolov, a young Slovakian Jew sent to Auschwitz in 1942. There, he assumes the heinous task of tattooing incoming Jewish prisoners with the dehumanizing numbers their SS captors use to identify them. When the Tätowierer, as he is called, meets fellow prisoner Gita Furman, 17, he is immediately smitten. Eventually, the attraction becomes mutual. Lale proves himself an operator, at once cagey and courageous: As the Tätowierer, he is granted special privileges and manages to smuggle food to starving prisoners. Through female prisoners who catalog the belongings confiscated from fellow inmates, Lale gains access to jewels, which he trades to a pair of local villagers for chocolate, medicine, and other items. Meanwhile, despite overwhelming odds, Lale and Gita are able to meet privately from time to time and become lovers. In 1944, just ahead of the arrival of Russian troops, Lale and Gita separately leave the concentration camp and experience harrowingly close calls. Suffice it to say they both survive. To her credit, the author doesn’t flinch from describing the depravity of the SS in Auschwitz and the unimaginable suffering of their victims—no gauzy evasions here, as in Boy in the Striped Pajamas. She also manages to raise, if not really explore, some trickier issues—the guilt of those Jews, like the tattooist, who survived by doing the Nazis’ bidding, in a sense betraying their fellow Jews; and the complicity of those non-Jews, like the Slovaks in Lale’s hometown, who failed to come to the aid of their beleaguered countrymen.
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as nonfiction. Still, this is a powerful, gut-wrenching tale that is hard to shake off.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-279715-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
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