Standard plotting, labored prose, wait for his next.
Thelma and Louise go clandestine, in a first hardcover by veteran Doherty.
Or make it Hannah and Neeley. These two resentful young women—cheated by love, cheated by life—are out to get back at . . . whatever. Start with Neeley. Her incredibly handsome and beloved Jean-Phillippe (“his name rolled through her brain with the accent she had acquired from her summers in France”) asks her to deliver a package as she boards a plane for Berlin. That it contains a bomb indicates an unmistakable shortfall in his feelings for her. But superagent Tony Gant foils the deadly plot, rescuing Neeley in the process. Gant works for the Cellar, more sub rosa than the CIA. He trains Neeley, converts her into a killing machine. Cut to Hannah Masterson, a housewife whose easy, yuppie existence is suddenly in shambles. Her ex-spy husband has inexplicably deserted her, leaving her penniless and bewildered. Back to Neeley in the aftermath of Gant's lingering death. Gnomic even posthumously, Gant has bequeathed her a complex puzzle she must solve in order to survive an enemy both shadowy and implacable. Clues lead Neeley to Hannah, and the women rapidly bond. Hannah surprises all with certain latent superspy abilities. She can bash an assailant with whatever's handy, pull a trigger, fly a plane, and, in general, rise to any derring-do occasion. Turns out there’s a videotape McGuffin that malodorous Senator Collins and others are ready to kill for. Hannah and Neeley race them for it. Mr. Nero, the blind genius—during WWII Gestapo torturers poked his eyes out—who has run the Cellar for six decades, deals himself a hand here but plays his cards so close to the vest even he might not know what his game is. Obligatory sanguinary showdown follows. Fate of the nation in the balance. Will the distaff spy team prevail? Guess.
Standard plotting, labored prose, wait for his next.Pub Date: March 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-765-31126-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2005
Sophomore slump.
More psychological suspense from the author of Final Girls (2017).
Anyone who grew up watching horror movies in the 1980s knows that summer camp can be a dangerous place. It certainly was for Emma Davis during her first stay at Camp Nightingale. The other three girls in her cabin disappeared one night, never to return. Fifteen years have passed, years in which Emma has revisited this ordeal again and again through her work as a painter. When she’s offered another opportunity to spend a summer at the camp, Emma barely hesitates. She’s ostensibly there to serve as an art instructor, but her real mission is to finally find out what happened to her friends. Thrillers are, by their very nature, formulaic. Sager met the demands of the genre while offering a fresh, anxiety-inducing story in Final Girls. The author is less successful here. Part of the problem is the pacing. It’s so slow that the reader has ample time to notice how contrived the novel’s setup is. Emma is clearly unwell, so her decision to go back to the site of her trauma makes some sense, but it’s hard to believe that the camp’s owners would want her back, especially since she played a pivotal role in turning one of them into a suspect and nearly ruining his life. As a first-person narrator, Emma withholds a lot of information, which feels fake and frustrating; moreover, the revelations—when they come—are hardly worth the wait. And it’s hard to trust an author who gets so many details wrong. For example, Emma’s first summer at Camp Nightingale would have been around 2003 or so. It beggars belief that a 13-year-old millennial wouldn’t be amply prepared for her first period, but that’s what Sager wants readers to think. There’s a contemporary scene in which girls walk by in a cloud of baby powder, Noxzema, and strawberry-scented shampoo, imagery that is intensely evocative of the 1970s and '80s—not so much 2018. The novel is shot through with such discordant moments, moments that lift us right out of the narrative and shatter the suspense.
Sophomore slump.Pub Date: July 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5247-4307-9
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2018
Falls short of Crichton’s many blockbusters, but fun reading nonetheless, especially for those interested in the early days...
In 1876, professor Edward Cope takes a group of students to the unforgiving American West to hunt for dinosaur fossils, and they make a tremendous discovery.
William Jason Tertullius Johnson, son of a shipbuilder and beneficiary of his father’s largess, isn’t doing very well at Yale when he makes a bet with his archrival (because every young man has one): accompany “the bone professor” Othniel Marsh to the West to dig for dinosaur fossils or pony up $1,000, but Marsh will only let Johnson join if he has a skill they can use. They need a photographer, so Johnson throws himself into the grueling task of learning photography, eventually becoming proficient. When Marsh and the team leave without him, he hitches a ride with another celebrated paleontologist, Marsh’s bitter rival, Edward Cope. Despite warnings about Indian activity, into the Judith badlands they go. It’s a harrowing trip: they weather everything from stampeding buffalo to back-breaking work, but it proves to be worth it after they discover the teeth of what looks to be a giant dinosaur, and it could be the discovery of the century if they can only get them back home safely. When the team gets separated while transporting the bones, Johnson finds himself in Deadwood and must find a way to get the bones home—and stay alive doing it. The manuscript for this novel was discovered in Crichton’s (Pirate Latitudes, 2009, etc.) archives by his wife, Sherri, and predates Jurassic Park (1990), but if readers are looking for the same experience, they may be disappointed: it’s strictly formulaic stuff. Famous folk like the Earp brothers make appearances, and Cope and Marsh, and the feud between them, were very real, although Johnson is the author’s own creation. Crichton takes a sympathetic view of American Indians and their plight, and his appreciation of the American West, and its harsh beauty, is obvious.
Falls short of Crichton’s many blockbusters, but fun reading nonetheless, especially for those interested in the early days of American paleontology.Pub Date: May 23, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-06-247335-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 6, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2017
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