High-tech gimmickry, kitchen-sink plotting, stick-figure characters. For devoted fans only.
It’s the near future, and China’s grip on Hong Kong goes slack—not unlike Coonts’s latest.
Virgil “Tiger” Cole, ex-navy pilot, is currently US consul general in the Orient’s most glamorous city. He’s also extremely rich, having built a small software company into a multinational giant. But the feds think he’s been doing some unsettling things with his money. Actually, a whole lot of his behavior has been unsettling, which is why Coonts’s go-anywhere hero Jake Grafton (Cuba, 1999, etc.), now a rear admiral, has his Pentagon paper-pushing interrupted for a special CIA-sponsored mission. He’s posted to Hong Kong because he flew with Cole in Vietnam: in fact, it was Jake who hung that colorful nickname on the then bombardier-navigator. More to the point, of course, he once saved Cole’s life. Though the two haven’t been in recent contact, the hope is that Cole will remember Jake fondly, be more forthcoming with him than he would be with others. And, under ordinary circumstances, it might well have worked out that way. The problem is that Cole’s financial and ideological connection to certain Hong Kong insurgents is complex indeed. Secrets and lies are thus inevitable. Before Jake can get a real sense of how hot a political pot he’s been dropped into, his wife Callie is kidnapped, along with a pivotal anti-Communist leader. Mean-spirited wiseguy Sonny Wong has bagged them, big-eyed at the prospect of their ransom potential. Bad mistake. They don’t come more mean-spirited than Jake Grafton when his blood is up, and nothing stops him—not man, nor beast, nor an assault team of the smartest, deadliest robots ever to be programmed for genre fiction.
High-tech gimmickry, kitchen-sink plotting, stick-figure characters. For devoted fans only.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2000
ISBN: 0-312-25339-7
Page Count: 384
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2000
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
The fine Israeli writer Yehoshua (Open Heart, 1996, etc.) makes a lengthy journey into the year 999, the end of the first millennium. Indeed, it is the idea of a great journey that is the heart of the story here. Ben Attar, a Moroccan Jewish merchant has come a long distance to France to seek out his nephew and former partner Abulafia. Ben Attar, the nephew, and a third partner, the Muslim Abu Lutfi, had once done a lucrative business importing spices and treasures from the Atlas Mountains to eager buyers in medieval Europe. But now their partnership has been threatened by a complex series of events, with Abulafia married to a pious Jewish widow who objects vehemently to Ben Attar’s two wives. Accompanied by a Spanish rabbi, whose cleverness is belied by his seeming ineffectualness; the rabbi’s young son, Abu Lutfi; the two wives; a timorous black slave boy, and a crew of Arab sailors, the merchant has come to Europe to fight for his former partnership. The battle takes place in two makeshift courtrooms in the isolated Jewish communities of the French countryside, in scenes depicted with extraordinary vividness. Yehoshua tells this complex, densely layered story of love, sexuality, betrayal and “the twilight days, [when] faiths [are] sharpened in the join between one millennium and the next” in a richly allusive, languorous prose, full of lengthy, packed sentences, with clauses tumbling one after another. De Lange’s translation is sensitively nuanced and elegant, catching the strangely hypnotic rhythms of Yehoshua’s style. As the story draws toward its tragic conclusion—but not the one you might expect—the effect is moving, subtle, at once both cerebral and emotional. One of Yehoshua’s most fully realized works: a masterpiece.
Pub Date: Jan. 19, 1999
ISBN: 0-385-48882-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1998
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