The author delivers another top-notch thriller, full of colorful characters, financial schemes, and exotic backdrops.
A novel blends espionage, retribution, and economics.
In this sequel to East of Egypt (2009), the author literally resurrects David Anderson, a longtime Special Forces operative and financial wizard. David had been left for dead by a CIA assassin after his mentor, Bill Murphy, and his lover Srey An were killed in the same duplicitous mission. A cardiac surgeon–turned-monk saves David’s life. The monk’s brother is Gen. Zhao, an ambitious military leader in China. Zhao takes advantage of David’s thirst for revenge and unique skill set to inflict fiscal ruin not only on the CIA, but also the United States itself, which the general blames for the death of his son. After Zhao uses—then kills—David’s contacts in this venture, the protagonist vows vengeance. As he explains to Ming Li, Zhao’s former aide and David’s new lover, the general remains a meticulous adversary: “Zhao kills as though he is moving chess pieces and eliminating people is of no greater consequence than removing chess pieces that threaten his King.” Initially, David gets assistance from the Americans and the Russians, but changing leadership results in them pursuing the hero as well. Still, David uses his brains, muscle, and drive as he attempts to complete his operation. In his narrative, Grant (The Lebensborn Experiment, 2011, etc.) makes effective use of regulatory loopholes in the mid-2000s that allow Zhao to rain monetary havoc on America. The taut thriller is almost a cautionary tale for today’s less-regulated economy. In this second volume of the series, David continues his evolution, as his two lovers have introduced him to Buddhism’s tenets, some of which, especially karma, he takes to heart. This spiritual turn raises the question of what’s next for a man who has been so immersed in violence for much of his adult life. One of the story’s drawbacks is that Zhao and, to a lesser degree, the Russian intelligence chief, Dmitri Vasiliev, are rather one-dimensional. In addition, in David’s brutal world, intriguing characters fall way too quickly. But the author has shown the ability to create believable new players to populate his series. So it’s a safe bet that Grant will forge a strong cast for his next installment.
The author delivers another top-notch thriller, full of colorful characters, financial schemes, and exotic backdrops.Pub Date: June 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4610-2009-7
Page Count: 286
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Aug. 10, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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