A smart, gritty political-conspiracy thriller.
In this finale to Lubitz’s (Beyond Top Secret, 2015, etc.) trilogy, the identities of two amnesiacs come into question as a secret group plans to unleash a powerful mind-control drug.
Bill and Cheryl Parker happily live in the secluded paradise of Hawaii’s Molokai island. Several years earlier in Colorado, a car accident left Bill in a coma and Cheryl with brain trauma, effectively shrouding their past lives in a fog. One day, an earthquake strikes the island, and the Parkers nearly die. In Washington, D.C., Beltway Insider reporter Connie Blythe sees Cheryl in disaster footage and believes that she’s a woman named Alana Shannon. More than two years earlier, Alana, a former men’s-magazine model, shot and killed her husband, a real estate magnate; she claimed self-defense, the murder charge was dropped, and she disappeared. Further research convinces Connie that Bill is actually a man named Ryan Butler. When Blythe confronts them, they deny being anyone other than the Parkers. Blythe doesn’t give up, however, as she’s sure that the pair can aid her investigation of warmongering U.S. Rep. Steven Luke of Missouri, the central figure in a plot to use a hypnosis drug to subvert the White House and manipulate the war on terror. In this swift final volume of his series, Lubitz, a former senior official at the U.S. Department of Justice, brings an insider’s perspective to his narrative, set in the immediate years after the 9/11 attacks. At one point, for example, a seasoned agent tells a younger one about President George W. Bush’s CIA: “These new guys are vicious sharks, and if you submit to their methods, they will destroy you and the agency.” Some characters will stop at nothing to achieve their goals, and the author effectively uses terse, chilling dialogue to get this across. For instance, a former KGB agent uses a fake persona to reel in a target; later, when the woman asks why she can’t speak with “Mr. Tyman,” he answers, “Because Mr. Tyman doesn’t exist.” Fans of the series, as well as newcomers, will also enjoy the protagonists’ optimism in the face of governmental corruption and global chaos.
A smart, gritty political-conspiracy thriller.Pub Date: March 20, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-692-85566-9
Page Count: 278
Publisher: Twist of Fate Press
Review Posted Online: April 26, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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