Patriotic liberals will gag at the tone of this novel, while their conservative counterparts will likely love it. Apolitical...
A political thriller that may try the patience of left-leaning readers.
A man and woman are taken hostage after a terrorist attack on a "peaceful trade mission" by the U.S. in Chechnya. Our government wants them back, of course, but only as long as the issue doesn't derail the president's re-election bid. Then the acting CIA director is murdered. The prez is a lefty in a government that’s overrun with lefties. The characters to root against are easy to identify: liberals with names like Fauhomme (false man?), Malovo (bad egg?) and Faust (devilish defense attorney?). Fauhomme, "the man who put the president in office," is cartoonishly bad—not only does he routinely abuse women and commit crimes to get the president re-elected, but we are repeatedly told that he's fat. The party in power and the president aren’t identified, but the author surely looks as though he’s targeting the current administration. Most thrillers don't come across as so blatantly partisan—usually the threat is external, or at least the bad guy doesn't personify half the U.S. population. The terrorists are al-Qaida, by the way, striking after the president has lied about their total defeat. The press is no better, as the lazy lap-dog liberal lackeys lap up whatever gruel the administration feeds them. A senator tells Fauhomme there's "not much the president can do except more character assassination." Readers who ignore (or appreciate) the narrator’s gratuitous comments will find a well-constructed novel underneath, including solid courtroom scenes. Prosecutor Butch Karp, who has a personal interest in the kidnapping case, is a talented and likable hero.
Patriotic liberals will gag at the tone of this novel, while their conservative counterparts will likely love it. Apolitical thriller junkies will probably enjoy it today and forget it tomorrow.Pub Date: Aug. 12, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4516-3557-7
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 4, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2014
A crime slowly unmasks a small town’s worth of resentment and yearning.
A hit-and-run in the Mojave Desert dismantles a family and puts a structurally elegant mystery in motion.
In her fourth book, Lalami is in thrilling command of her narrative gifts, reminding readers why The Moor’s Account (2014) was a Pulitzer finalist. Here, she begins in the voice of Nora Guerraoui, a nascent jazz composer, who recalls: "My father was killed on a spring night four years ago, while I sat in the corner booth of a new bistro in Oakland.” She was drinking champagne at the time. Nora’s old middle school band mate, Jeremy Gorecki, an Iraq War veteran beset with insomnia, narrates the next chapter. He hears about the hit-and-run as he reports to work as a deputy sheriff. The third chapter shifts to Efraín Aceves, an undocumented laborer who stops in the dark to adjust his bicycle chain and witnesses the lethal impact. Naturally, he wants no entanglement with law enforcement. With each chapter, the story baton passes seamlessly to a new or returning narrator. Readers hear from Erica Coleman, a police detective with a complacent husband and troubled son; Anderson Baker, a bowling-alley proprietor irritated over shared parking with the Guerraoui’s diner; the widowed Maryam Guerraoui; and even the deceased Driss Guerraoui. Nora’s parents fled political upheaval in Casablanca in 1981, roughly a decade before Lalami left Morocco herself. In the U.S., Maryam says, “Above all, I was surprised by the talk shows, the way Americans loved to confess on television.” The author, who holds a doctorate in linguistics, is precise with language. She notices the subtle ways that words on a diner menu become dated, a match to the décor: “The plates were gray. The water glasses were scratched. The gumball machine was empty.” Nuanced characters drive this novel, and each voice gets its variation: Efraín sarcastic, Nora often argumentative, Salma, the good Guerraoui daughter, speaks with the coiled fury of the duty-bound: “You’re never late, never sick, never rude.” The ending is a bit pat, but Lalami expertly mines an American penchant for rendering the “other.”
A crime slowly unmasks a small town’s worth of resentment and yearning.Pub Date: March 26, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5247-4715-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: Dec. 10, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2019
King fans won’t be disappointed, though most will likely prefer the scarier likes of The Shining and It.
The master of modern horror returns with a loose-knit parapsychological thriller that touches on territory previously explored in Firestarter and Carrie.
Tim Jamieson is a man emphatically not in a hurry. As King’s (The Outsider, 2018, etc.) latest opens, he’s bargaining with a flight attendant to sell his seat on an overbooked run from Tampa to New York. His pockets full, he sticks out his thumb and winds up in the backwater South Carolina town of DuPray (should we hear echoes of “pray”? Or “depraved”?). Turns out he’s a decorated cop, good at his job and at reading others (“You ought to go see Doc Roper,” he tells a local. “There are pills that will brighten your attitude”). Shift the scene to Minneapolis, where young Luke Ellis, precociously brilliant, has been kidnapped by a crack extraction team, his parents brutally murdered so that it looks as if he did it. Luke is spirited off to Maine—this is King, so it’s got to be Maine—and a secret shadow-government lab where similarly conscripted paranormally blessed kids, psychokinetic and telepathic, are made to endure the Skinnerian pain-and-reward methods of the evil Mrs. Sigsby. How to bring the stories of Tim and Luke together? King has never minded detours into the unlikely, but for this one, disbelief must be extra-willingly suspended. In the end, their forces joined, the two and their redneck allies battle the sophisticated secret agents of The Institute in a bloodbath of flying bullets and beams of mental energy (“You’re in the south now, Annie had told these gunned-up interlopers. She had an idea they were about to find out just how true that was"). It’s not King at his best, but he plays on current themes of conspiracy theory, child abuse, the occult, and Deep State malevolence while getting in digs at the current occupant of the White House, to say nothing of shadowy evil masterminds with lisps.
King fans won’t be disappointed, though most will likely prefer the scarier likes of The Shining and It.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-9821-1056-7
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Aug. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2019
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