An action-packed thriller with careful doses of sci-fi and family drama.
In Renneberg’s (The Mothership, 2013) new thriller, a corporate financier seeks the truth about his long-lost father and finds himself caught up in an international time-traveling conspiracy.
Craig Balard works in mergers and acquisitions at a well-to-do New York City firm. After a secretive and wealthy client, MLI, suddenly cuts off its business, all the company’s partners are speedily, professionally executed. Before Craig realizes what’s happening, a mysterious caller offers him information about his father, whom he believed died a Gulf War hero, in exchange for the master list of MLI’s bank accounts. Craig escapes his imminent death or capture by several different violent conspiratorial bodies—including the FBI and a dangerous military group exacting a coup d’état in Moscow—with the help of Marlena, a hologram projected into the present from a dystopian 23rd century, and Valentina, a Russian criminal investigator. Glimpses into Marlena’s devastated reality, where mankind barely survives aboard a space station, reveal that Craig’s present-day actions could determine the very future of humanity. Renneberg delivers a typically exciting thriller, with plenty of sharp turns, heavy weapons and touches of science fiction. The time-traveling, continent-hopping narration is remarkably smooth, although the storytelling is sometimes complicated by the author’s wordy fascination with military gear and intelligence, but techno-thriller readers who geek out over helicopter models and Soviet special ops will likely be pleased. The plot is also uncomfortably driven by Cold War–hangover politics that sometimes smack of anti-Russian and anti-Chinese xenophobia; such unsubtle tropes are familiar in spy stories but muddle an otherwise balanced take on geopolitical corruption and conflict. Nevertheless, Renneberg’s complex, accessible tale is fun to follow.
An action-packed thriller with careful doses of sci-fi and family drama.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-0-9874347-6-0
Page Count: -
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 21, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these...
Figuratively and literally shattering moments of hoRRRRRipilication in Chamberlain, Maine where stones fly from the sky rather than from the hands of the villagers (as they did in "The Lottery," although the latter are equal to other forms of persecution).
All beginning when Carrie White discovers a gift with telekinetic powers (later established as a genetic fact), after she menstruates in full ignorance of the process and thinks she is bleeding to death while the other monsters in the high school locker room bait and bully her mercilessly. Carrie is the only child of a fundamentalist freak mother who has brought her up with a concept of sin which no blood of the Lamb can wash clean. In addition to a sympathetic principal and gym teacher, there's one girl who wishes to atone and turns her date for the spring ball over to Carrie who for the first time is happy, beautiful and acknowledged as such. But there will be hell to pay for this success—not only her mother but two youngsters who douse her in buckets of fresh-killed pig blood so that Carrie once again uses her "wild talent," flexes her mind and a complete catastrophe (explosion and an uncontrolled fire) virtually destroys the town.
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these youngsters who once ate peanut butter now scrawl "Carrie White eats shit." But as they still say around here, "Sit a spell and collect yourself."Pub Date: April 8, 1974
ISBN: 0385086954
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1974
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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