An occasionally fun thriller, despite simplistic enemies and clunky dialogue.
In Weissmann’s debut thriller, a diving expedition for lost diamonds comes up against storms, sharks, and neo-Nazis.
Erik Hazen is a 46-year-old charter-fishing captain who docks his vessel, the Finest Kind, on the shores of Montauk, New York, on Long Island. There’s plenty of adventure (and tragedy) in his past, including exploration of the Andrea Doria wreck, said to be the Mount Everest of diving expeditions. The beautiful Laura Morgan meets him to propose a new dive to that famous, sunken ship; specifically, she wants to recover a cache of diamonds there, which her uncle had hidden away to keep it from falling into Nazi hands. Her motives are pure, however; she works for a foundation seeking to restore stolen wealth to Holocaust victims’ families. So Hazen feels compelled to act, despite his painful memories of his wife’s death on an Andrea Doria dive. He assembles his team of divers and sets out on an exploratory mission, but it turns out that a dark alliance of neo-Nazis and Palestinian terrorists are after the loot, too—and they’re armed to the teeth. Weissmann’s villains are venomously racist and laughably evil, and their presence flattens the narrative into a standard thriller scenario. However, the author manages to wring some tension out of the perilous sea voyage; there’s a great sense of foreboding, for example, when Hazen finds a rotting whale carcass, which is sure to attract great white sharks. The colorful dialogue is full of local expressions (Hazen explains that fishermen call pilot whales “blackfish,” for example), but also clichés, and there’s too much empty talk, including this bland exchange between Hazen and Morgan: “ ‘The more things change, the more they stay the same.’ ‘Yes. It was Uncle Carl’s favorite expression.’ ” It might have helped if the author had provided more of a sense of atmosphere during the dives, and deeper descriptions of the shipwrecks. That said, readers looking for a straight-ahead adventure plot may enjoy this novel with an unusual setting.
An occasionally fun thriller, despite simplistic enemies and clunky dialogue.Pub Date: Nov. 26, 2014
ISBN: 978-1625501820
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Llumina Press
Review Posted Online: May 5, 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
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
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