The first third, with its cast of devious Beltway types lining up for the chance to plant their feet in each others’...
Horn follows his expert, formulaic legal-suspense debut (In Her Defense, 2000) with a big-picture Washington thriller juiced within an inch of its vastly entertaining life.
Philip Barkley’s career with the Justice Department is in the toilet, his little girl has died, and his wife has left him for a presidential hopeful. His animus against Sen. Warren Young, his ex-wife Constance’s soaring hubby, makes him the perfectly plausible person to oversee the investigation into the disappearance of Young’s aide Martin Green, since who would imagine Philip would ever hide any of Young’s dirty linen? Unfortunately for the bigwigs who put him on Green’s trail, Philip’s got nothing left to lose—and that makes him dangerously unpredictable and independent when the inquiry he’s partnering with beautiful, ambitious FBI agent Blair Turner links Green to rumors of security breaches and espionage payoffs. When the Youngs, who’ve strenuously maintained Green’s innocence, do an about-face and throw him to the dogs just in time for his body to be discovered, his suicide seems equally pat to Philip. Cutting himself loose from Justice and the case, he launches a freelance investigation that will take him to New York to Arizona to Florida, back in time to another suspicious suicide in 1955, and across the seas to a monstrous plot that goes back even further. There’ll be scene after scene of deliciously deft political maneuvering and backstabbing as the highly visible principals plot to spin each new development as favorably as possible no matter who they have to toss overboard—before Philip allies himself with a retired New York cop to follow the twisty trail to the utterly unsurprising perps.
The first third, with its cast of devious Beltway types lining up for the chance to plant their feet in each others’ posteriors, is the best. Even after Horn settles into a more familiar conspiracy-adventure mode, though, he provides all the thrills you’d expect from a superior beach-blanket read.Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2002
ISBN: 0-06-019441-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.
“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-55634-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
PROFILES
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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