Mostly fun—and agreeably tense now and then—but a bit overwritten, as if crime novels need literary bolstering to be...
Surprisingly hip insurance-fraud investigators wage war against unscrupulous buyers of policies owned by the soon (occasionally too-soon) to die.
The field of battle in Dooling’s latest (after Brain Storm, 1998, etc.) is Omaha, where insurance companies guard their stupendous holdings against attacks by fake dead people, professional accident victims, and myriad tricksters with their endless versions of calamity. Carver Hartnett, Miranda Pryor, and Lenny Stillnacht comprise the staunch antifraud core at Reliable Allied Trust. They may look like garden-variety technoslackers, and it’s true they ingest ungodly amounts of easily abused substances, but their hearts are pure and they’re sincerely devoted to whacking away at the con artists besetting all great insurance companies. Alas, as they uncover bunk in claim after claim, they sense a shift in corporate strategy as company overlords elect to pay out bogus claims and recoup costs through spiraling premiums rather than through elaborate investigations and the courts. And now Lenny has been fired for his politically incorrect recommendation to blow off 20 claims for 20 identically named Nigerians, even though Nigeria is the world capital of fraud. Within 24 hours, Lenny is found dead, his blood swimming in drugs—and HIV. As it turns out, HIV is the common element in a slew of dicey claims filed by or for Heartland, a purchaser of viaticals, the rather creepy arrangements by which investors, in the dread days before protease inhibitors, purchased life insurance policies from AIDS victims who needed cash in this world rather than the next. Carver, who has lusted for Miranda through bottle after bottle of the splendid wines that are her indulgence, is sure that thoroughly heterosexual Lenny’s death is its own case of fraud. But on whose part? Lenny’s? Heartland’s? Miranda’s? Reliable Allied Trust’s? Complications—and investigations—ensue.
Mostly fun—and agreeably tense now and then—but a bit overwritten, as if crime novels need literary bolstering to be respectable.Pub Date: Nov. 8, 2002
ISBN: 0-06-050539-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2002
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.
The time is the not-so-distant future, when the US's spiraling social freedoms have finally called down a reaction, an Iranian-style repressive "monotheocracy" calling itself the Republic of Gilead—a Bible-thumping, racist, capital-punishing, and misogynistic rule that would do away with pleasure altogether were it not for one thing: that the Gileadan women, pure and true (as opposed to all the nonbelieving women, those who've ever been adulterous or married more than once), are found rarely fertile.
Thus are drafted a whole class of "handmaids," whose function is to bear the children of the elite, to be fecund or else (else being certain death, sent out to be toxic-waste removers on outlying islands). The narrative frame for Atwood's dystopian vision is the hopeless private testimony of one of these surrogate mothers, Offred ("of" plus the name of her male protector). Lying cradled by the body of the barren wife, being meanwhile serviced by the husband, Offred's "ceremony" must be successful—if she does not want to join the ranks of the other disappeared (which include her mother, her husband—dead—and small daughter, all taken away during the years of revolt). One Of her only human conduits is a gradually developing affair with her master's chauffeur—something that's balanced more than offset, though, by the master's hypocritically un-Puritan use of her as a kind of B-girl at private parties held by the ruling men in a spirit of nostalgia and lust. This latter relationship, edging into real need (the master's), is very effectively done; it highlights the handmaid's (read Everywoman's) eternal exploitation, profane or sacred ("We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices"). Atwood, to her credit, creates a chillingly specific, imaginable night-mare. The book is short on characterization—this is Atwood, never a warm writer, at her steeliest—and long on cynicism—it's got none of the human credibility of a work such as Walker Percy's Love In The Ruins. But the scariness is visceral, a world that's like a dangerous and even fatal grid, an electrified fence.
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1985
ISBN: 038549081X
Page Count: -
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1985
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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