A worthy thriller starring a tireless and always-reliable protagonist.
In this fourth installment of a series, a graduate student/amateur spy aids in an archaeologist’s risky quest to locate a religious site filled with valuable relics.
Travis Weld, who works for a secret government agency, has enlisted Chesney Barrett’s help in the past. He’s also extensively trained the grad student, who’s doing environmental research in the Louisiana Atchafalaya Basin. Her latest task is liberating archaeologist David Phillips from a leftist guerrilla organization in Mexico. She succeeds, also saving Dr. Tanadas, director of Mayan archaeological studies, in the process. But her work isn’t finished: David’s father, Jacob, wants Chesney to join his son in his newest archaeological trek. She can ensure Tanadas doesn’t take credit for the discovery while protecting David from potential treasure hunters and rebels. David is searching for God’s Domain, the legendary—and presumably relic-filled—dwelling site of Viracocha, god over all gods and the people in the Americas. In a search that takes them to Peru, David and Chesney will have to make alliances with dangerous individuals, including artifact smuggler Col. Montez. But unknown to anyone, awaiting them at the sacred site is something entirely unexpected, as a formidable guardian turns David’s hunt into a test of survival. As in the preceding novels in Gallant’s (Rob the Vatican, 2007, etc.) thriller series, Chesney is a vigorous protagonist; she’s unquestionably the muscle in David’s expedition. But while the rescue mission opens the story with searing action, the pace then slows down significantly, as David deciphers hieroglyphs and decodes maps. Still, the search is often riddled with tension; Chesney must constantly remind David to keep quiet about details of God’s Domain, with suspect, greedy men populating the narrative. The latter half takes a rather surprising turn as the group nears the religious site, but it also presents Chesney with a new, seemingly unbeatable challenge. Meanwhile, her attraction to the appealing David rivals her lingering feelings for the emotionally distant Travis, but unfortunately the story doesn’t fully explore the romantic quandary.
A worthy thriller starring a tireless and always-reliable protagonist.Pub Date: June 18, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-73229-774-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Bookmark Publications
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2018
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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