An engrossing look at two morally ambivalent men confronting foes who are greedier and deadlier than they are.
One of America’s supposed secrets becomes the backdrop of this thriller.
It has long been rumored that the CIA used raw opium to finance covert operations against the North Vietnamese during the Vietnam War. In this tale, the CIA recruits botanist Bill Murphy, just out of college, to help the agency produce opium in the area of Southeast Asia known as the “Golden Triangle.” When the policy of Vietnamization catches Bill by surprise, he gets rescued by Special Ops soldier David Anderson, the man who will become his partner for life. After the CIA leaves Bill high and dry a second time, in Afghanistan, he and David become “producers,” converting the raw opium into 99 percent pure China White heroin, which they supply to the triad network in Hong Kong, to be distributed worldwide. Bill handles the product while David takes care of the finances. But after a time, it becomes obvious that someone in the triad wants to displace them from the supply chain. The pair ends up on the radar of the U.S. military’s drug-eradication mission as well. The two decide to strike back after friends and loved ones are killed. They pit the triad and the military against each other and escape. But their plan to sail off into the sunset on their superyacht fails because there are too many people who still want them dead. As David tells Bill: “Every time we relax and start to feel normal, we will constantly be looking at our sixes, because they will always be one step behind us and forever in our shit.” So they undertake one last mission. Grant (Mahdi, 2016, etc.) impressively brings readers inside a dark, dirty world of drugs and money. The author has created likable antiheroes in Bill and David, who belatedly grow consciences. The danger-packed novel is well-researched with plenty of details, especially about the military gear being employed. One drawback is the book could have used more thorough editing, with capitalization and punctuation errors throughout inhibiting the generally smooth-flowing narrative (for example, “He loved anything related to plant life was already accustomed to the humidity in Michigan and he didn’t ask a lot of questions”). But overall, this is an absorbing, heart-wrenching tale.
An engrossing look at two morally ambivalent men confronting foes who are greedier and deadlier than they are.Pub Date: April 23, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4414-9247-0
Page Count: 334
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: April 27, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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