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SIBERIAN LIGHT

After four high-tech thrillers (The Last High Ground, 1995, etc.), White does a star turn with a detective story set in post-communist Siberia. Three years ago, Gregori Nowek—a geologist whose criticisms of Soviet oil-drilling got him banished to frozen Irkutsk—was elected mayor of his new town with the slogan ``Can I Do Any Worse?'' Still mourning wife Nina, who died in a plane crash, he has failed to make peace with his teenage daughter, Galena, or with the gleefully corrupt world of the new Russia. One spring day, Nowek's asked by his Moscow superior, Arkady Volsky, to investigate the murder of Andrei Ryzkhov, a wealthy local liaison with AmerRus, the American-Russian cooperative drilling for ``Siberian light'' crude oil in the Tunguska fields. Not only was Ryzkhov's throat cut, but two of the city's police militamen were similarly slaughtered. Nowek's inquiries are discouraged by ex-KGB Major Kaznin and by the coolly cruel Irkjutsk prosecutor, Gromov, who worries that a scandal would disturb the flow of bribes coming from AmerRus. Nowek perseveres, his geologist's eye uncovering clues that Major Kaznin ``missed.'' These lead him to Tunguska, site of the AmerRus drilling base, where, unknown to him, his daughter has been abducted by a lecherously lethal American AmerRus worker, Paul Decker. Tunguska is also home to an endangered species of Siberian tigers under the watchful eye of Dr. Anna Vereskaya, now a murder suspect. Nowek falls in love, but, predictably, his struggle to prove Anna innocent, rescue his daughter from her loathesome paramour, and deal with AmerRus's secret reason for exploiting Siberia—all bring forth resources of character that Nowek wasn't aware he had. The climax is labored, though it supports White's thesis that no change of economy will stop bad guys from being very bad. Almost, but not quite, a rewrite of Gorky Park, enlived throughout by hilarious looks at the old regime, at mud-splattered Siberia, and at the irrepressible vileness of human greed. ($150,000 ad/promo)

Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1997

ISBN: 0-385-31688-7

Page Count: 384

Publisher: Delacorte

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1997

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'SALEM'S LOT

A super-exorcism that leaves the taste of somebody else's blood in your mouth and what a bad taste it is. King presents us with the riddle of a small Maine town that has been deserted overnight. Where did all the down-Easters go? Matter of fact, they're still there but they only get up at sundown. . . for a warm drink. . . .Ben Mears, a novelist, returns to Salem's Lot (pop. 1319), the hometown he hasn't seen since he was four years old, where he falls for a young painter who admires his books (what happens to her shouldn't happen to a Martian). Odd things are manifested. Someone rents the ghastly old Marsten mansion, closed since a horrible double murder-suicide in 1939; a dog is found impaled on a spiked fence; a healthy boy dies of anemia in one week and his brother vanishes. Ben displays tremendous calm considering that you're left to face a corpse that sits up after an autopsy and sinks its fangs into the coroner's neck. . . . Vampirism, necrophilia, et dreadful alia rather overplayed by the author of Carrie (1974).

Pub Date: Oct. 17, 1975

ISBN: 0385007515

Page Count: 458

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1975

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THE SEVEN AGES

A fine demonstration of the power and versatility of Glück’s verse, this volume will delight fans and intrigue newcomers.

Glück’s international reputation as an accomplished and critically acclaimed contemporary poet makes the arrival of her new volume an eagerly anticipated event. This slender collection meets these expectations with 44 poems that pull the reader into a realm of meditation and memory. She sets most of them in the heat of summer—a time of year when nature seems almost oppressively heavy with life—in order to meditate on the myriad realities posed by life and death. Glück mines common childhood images (a grandmother transforming summer fruit into a cool beverage, two sisters applying fingernail polish in a backyard) to resurrect the intense feelings that accompany awakening to the sensual promises of life, and she desperately explores these resonant images, searching for a path that might reconcile her to the inevitability of death. These musings produce the kinds of spiritual insights that draw so many readers to her work: she suggests that we perceive our experiences most intensely when tempered by memory, and that such experiences somehow provide meaning for our lives. Yet for all her metaphysical sensitivity and poetic craftsmanship, Glück reaffirms our ultimate fate: we all eventually die. Rather than resort to pithy mysticism or self-obsessive angst, she boldly insists that death creeps in the shadows of even our brightest summers. The genius of her poems lies in their ability to sear the summertime onto our souls in such a way that its “light will give us no peace.”

A fine demonstration of the power and versatility of Glück’s verse, this volume will delight fans and intrigue newcomers.

Pub Date: April 9, 2001

ISBN: 0-06-018526-0

Page Count: 80

Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2001

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