No other bestselling author crunches the language quite like Cook, but he does know how to make his pages fly—which is what made last year's dull Blindsight so unforgivable. Not so this newest, which finds Cook back on track—like a runaway locomotive- -with a manically entertaining thriller. Sean Murphy is a brash son of Boston's Irish ghetto, a reformed thief whose brains have gotten him into Harvard Med. Now Sean's heading for Miami's Forbes Cancer Center, which has a mysterious 100% success rate treating medulloblastoma, a type of brain cancer. Once south, though, Sean finds that the Center's head, Randolph Mason, wants him to work not on the ``medulloblastoma protocol'' but on crystallizing ``murine monoclonal antibodies'' (Cook pours on the medical know-how here). Moreover, Janet Reardon, the nurse/lover Sean dumped in Boston, has followed Sean to Forbes. But never mind: Sean decides to steal Forbes's research and give it to the world, and to enlist Janet's help. When Forbes's Japanese backers learn of Sean's aim, though, they send an assassin after him; but the killer has to get in line behind the p.i. that Mason has hired to look into Sean, and the Nazi-like head of Forbes security—not to mention Forbes's resident orderly/serial-killer (no threat to Hannibal Lecter, though he does keep his dead mom in a freezer) who's been ``liberating'' patients, and who decides that Janet is on to him. A madcap chase to Key West and back winds up with Sean taking Mason hostage. Will a SWAT team neutralize Sean before he can prove that the medulloblastoma protocol is key to an evil scheme to fund the money-starved Clinic? All this antic action, and a Message about the financial plight of medical research too: So what if Janet finds her heart ``pounding and knowing her face is flushed''? Chalk up another big one for Cook. (Literary Guild Dual Selection for Winter)
Pub Date: Jan. 4, 1993
ISBN: 0-399-13771-8
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1992
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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
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