Politics, romance, and murder descend on the Vatican as a jewel thief works to pull off the biggest heist in history.
Craig Reynolds, a dashing and enigmatic jewel thief who “aborts elaborate alarm systems, unlocks the most intricate vaults, and eludes massive manhunts,” has stumbled on a golden opportunity. On a train to Rome, he runs into Darlena Aldonzo, a beautiful Italian gymnast who had previously been his hostage—the sense of mutual respect and admiration that led him to release her is now blossoming into something more. Unable to resist his charms, Darlena goes against her better judgment and agrees to spend time visiting the eternal city with her former captor. She even takes him to meet her dear friend Thad, a priest who currently works at the Vatican. Thad conveniently reveals to Craig that he is the only person alive who possesses a map of the Vatican’s vast underground catacombs—a chance Craig can’t pass up. As Darlena allows herself to be drawn into Craig’s plans, a terrible danger brews in the background and threatens to complicate the heist and put all of their lives in danger: a group of ruthless cardinals is plotting to usurp the pope. Meanwhile, INTERPOL Detective Martin Von Meier, who has been chasing Craig for years, is getting closer. Gallant has created likable main characters who careen from one unbelievable scenario to the next, but his emphasis is clearly on their predicaments. Within the first 20 pages of meeting Darlena, she is almost drowned, almost raped, almost strangled, kidnapped, and finally chased by a gang of rioters “plundering” a commuter train—all before the main plot begins. The rest of the novel follows this aggressive pattern, delivering well-staged, suspenseful action sequences in rapid succession but leaving little time for much else. Craig’s disabled sister, for example, vanishes from the novel. Some may be disappointed that Gallant didn’t devote more time to the intriguing relationship between his two leads, but those who love page-turning thrillers will be delighted that, for these characters, danger lurks everywhere.
A thriller that delivers real excitement but glosses many gripping plot points.
Pub Date: May 14, 2007
ISBN: 978-0595439249
Page Count: 234
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 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
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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