Sheldon, a schlockmeister beyond dispraise, handles his tale with stupefying skill. Hardly a simplistic sentence passes by...
Laughable and ridiculous suspense but bound for big sales, seeing that Sheldon has already sold 300 million copies of his 17 earlier novels and has written over 200 TV scripts and several Broadway hits.
The author’s afterword tells us that he’s serious about the environmental dangers in his novel, although his plot has holes bigger than those worrisome spaces in the ozone layer. Well, there’s this gigantic think-tank, Kingsley International Group, led by Tanner Kingsley, and we’re not sure what its goals are. Tanner’s brother Andrew, whom he almost kills, is a genius who wins the Nobel Prize for science while trying to guide KIG into saving Third World countries from their various disasters. Tanner, meanwhile, prefers to use the think-tank to become a world powerbroker and the richest man on earth. However, since he’s not that yet, his girlfriend Pauline leaves him for a richer man and has herself elected senator. Meanwhile, several scientists on advanced weather projects for KIG are murdered. Two wives to the murdered men fall into each other’s orbit and find themselves trying to discover why and how the murders came about. Their search for answers takes them all over the country and to Spain, France and England. But, wherever they go, Tanner Kingsley tries to have them murdered by his thug Harry Flint. He’s tracking them through super devices that won’t be on the market for five years, if then, and thus the two women can’t flee his eye or ear no matter how many times they evade Harry Flint. Eventually, and we shouldn’t tell you this but it makes little difference, Tanner holds many countries hostage to crop destruction by weather patterns he controls. You needn’t know more than this.
Sheldon, a schlockmeister beyond dispraise, handles his tale with stupefying skill. Hardly a simplistic sentence passes by without adding to plot and suspense. You race on despite one readable, jaw-dropping inanity after another. Oh, hell, call this is a selling review.Pub Date: Sept. 14, 2004
ISBN: 0-06-055934-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2004
Greed, love, and extrasensory abilities combine in two middling mysteries.
Coulter’s treasured FBI agents take on two cases marked by danger and personal involvement.
Dillon Savitch and his wife, Lacey Sherlock, have special abilities that have served them well in law enforcement (Paradox, 2018, etc.). But that doesn't prevent Sherlock’s car from hitting a running man after having been struck by a speeding SUV that runs a red light. The runner, though clearly injured, continues on his way and disappears. Not so the SUV driver, a security engineer for the Bexholt Group, which has ties to government agencies. Sherlock’s own concussion causes memory loss so severe that she doesn’t recognize Savitch or remember their son, Sean. The whole incident seems more suspicious when a blood test from the splatter of the man Sherlock hit reveals that he’s Justice Cummings, an analyst for the CIA. The agency’s refusal to cooperate makes Savitch certain that Bexholt is involved in a deep-laid plot. Meanwhile, Special Agent Griffin Hammersmith is visiting friends who run a cafe in the touristy Virginia town of Gaffers Ridge. Hammersmith, who has psychic abilities, is taken aback when he hears in his mind a woman’s cry for help. Reporter Carson DeSilva, who came to the area to interview a Nobel Prize winner, also has psychic abilities, and she overhears the thoughts of Rafer Bodine, a young man who has apparently kidnapped and possibly murdered three teenage girls. Unluckily, she blurts out her thoughts, and she’s snatched and tied up in a cellar by Bodine. Bodine may be a killer, but he’s also the nephew of the sheriff and the son of the local bigwig. So the sheriff arrests Hammersmith and refuses to accept his FBI credentials. Bodine's mother has psychic powers strong enough to kill, but she meets her match in Hammersmith, DeSilva, Savitch, and Sherlock.
Greed, love, and extrasensory abilities combine in two middling mysteries.Pub Date: July 30, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-9365-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.
A man walks out of a bar and his life becomes a kaleidoscope of altered states in this science-fiction thriller.
Crouch opens on a family in a warm, resonant domestic moment with three well-developed characters. At home in Chicago’s Logan Square, Jason Dessen dices an onion while his wife, Daniela, sips wine and chats on the phone. Their son, Charlie, an appealing 15-year-old, sketches on a pad. Still, an undertone of regret hovers over the couple, a preoccupation with roads not taken, a theme the book will literally explore, in multifarious ways. To start, both Jason and Daniela abandoned careers that might have soared, Jason as a physicist, Daniela as an artist. When Charlie was born, he suffered a major illness. Jason was forced to abandon promising research to teach undergraduates at a small college. Daniela turned from having gallery shows to teaching private art lessons to middle school students. On this bracing October evening, Jason visits a local bar to pay homage to Ryan Holder, a former college roommate who just received a major award for his work in neuroscience, an honor that rankles Jason, who, Ryan says, gave up on his career. Smarting from the comment, Jason suffers “a sucker punch” as he heads home that leaves him “standing on the precipice.” From behind Jason, a man with a “ghost white” face, “red, pursed lips," and "horrifying eyes” points a gun at Jason and forces him to drive an SUV, following preset navigational directions. At their destination, the abductor forces Jason to strip naked, beats him, then leads him into a vast, abandoned power plant. Here, Jason meets men and women who insist they want to help him. Attempting to escape, Jason opens a door that leads him into a series of dark, strange, yet eerily familiar encounters that sometimes strain credibility, especially in the tale's final moments.
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.Pub Date: July 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-90422-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
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