Even if the dramatic tension sometimes sags, well-drawn locations and intriguing characters keep this thriller enjoyable.
The hero of Coleman’s debut thriller has a lot to prove, including his innocence.
Peter Barrett almost had it all. He was a vice president at Hudson Enterprises, a reputable computer corporation, and he had a gorgeous wife, “two expensive cars and a home worth more than five million dollars.” The only thing he didn’t have? His father-in-law’s complete respect—and his father-in-law just happened to be his boss. Peter entered into a “high-stakes business gamble” that required him to transfer $70 million of Hudson Enterprises’ money to a government account in Cuba. If the deal succeeded, Peter would win a huge contract that his father-in-law couldn’t help but admire, so when the CIA agent brokering the deal told Peter it had to be kept in the “strictest confidence,” he agreed. The CIA agent promised Peter that the money would be returned to Hudson Enterprises within 45 days, but then the newspapers heard about the transfer—as well as rumors that Cuba was planning to buy medium-range guided missiles with the money. In the eyes of almost everyone, Peter went from being a prosperous businessman to a thief, a traitor and a terrorist. When the novel opens, Peter is trying to grapple with the public revelation of the news. He initially decides against avoiding the consequences and heads to the office, where he assumes he’ll be arrested. But when Peter sees the police and his father-in-law, he decides to follow his instincts and make a run for it. Peter’s race against the clock to prove his innocence will take him to a friend from his past, across the country and even to Cuba. But will that be enough? And will he be able to escape the people who want him dead? Coleman’s characters are vivid and believable; from Peter to his friend Sky, a former actress with an “uncanny sense of street smarts,” Coleman creates people who are realistic and quirky. Unfortunately, though fast-paced, the circumstances are often implausible. First, would Peter really be able to transfer $70 million without anyone else immediately noticing? And second, almost every time Peter gets into a tight spot, he’s miraculously saved by a new character—first Sky, then Sky’s father, then a friend of Sky’s father, among others. His adventures would have been more suspenseful if more often he’d had to rely on his own wits.
Even if the dramatic tension sometimes sags, well-drawn locations and intriguing characters keep this thriller enjoyable.Pub Date: June 27, 2013
ISBN: 978-0988596306
Page Count: 315
Publisher: Seth Coleman
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2013
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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