High-speed espionage thriller with sci-fi touches that’ll have readers impatiently waiting for the next installment.
The first volume of a two-part thriller series brings back Jake Bronson, who’s determined to find out why an unknown group has been abducting his family and friends, in Bard’s (Beyond Judgment, 2013, etc.) latest.
Jake has already saved the world using his superior mental abilities, like transmitting thoughts. But he’d rather sidestep any publicity drawn to him or his similarly gifted 7-year-old son, Alex. Someone, however, has targeted him: A text from his wife, Francesca—“NOW!”—means that danger has necessitated a contingency plan. When Francesca and their kids go missing, Jake realizes that none of the 13 people, including friends all around the world, have checked in at a website per their emergency-response plan. Spearheading the attack may be the Everlast Institute, whose most recent venture is the preservation of a human consciousness on a computer chip. Jake makes his way to Everlast in Holland, hoping the company’s founder, Frederik de Vries, can explain what the company wants from him—and where his family is. Readers unfamiliar with Bard’s previous trilogy featuring Jake need not fret: While the book heavily references the protagonist’s earlier adventures, it provides clear elaboration without saturating the story in plot details. For example, the origins of the “mini”—a miniature, magical pyramid—aren’t important, but it’s unmistakable that Jake’s mental powers are slowly waning without it. Once readers have caught up with returning characters, such as couple Marshall and actress Lacey, as well as the main villain, who has retribution on the mind, the story ignites pages with scenes of action and suspense. There are shootouts, car chases and even a pursuit on foot; meanwhile, Ahmed and Sarafina (Jake and Francesca’s other kids) are aboard a plane headed for an unwelcome crash landing. The baddies are just as diverse as Jake’s group—they have to be since they’re stationed globally, from Hong Kong and Rome to the U.S.—but standouts are Lin, Min and Zhin, triplet sisters known for their beauty yet in possession of much more. Zhin has an exceptional intellect, and Min is a skilled fighter, while all three have their own reasons for vengeance against Jake and company. Bard doesn’t give readers time to breathe, and while it’s unfortunate that not every good guy makes it to the end, there’s a solid cliffhanger.
High-speed espionage thriller with sci-fi touches that’ll have readers impatiently waiting for the next installment.Pub Date: Dec. 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-0692321362
Page Count: 300
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Dec. 16, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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