Top-quality debut suspense novel, set largely in South America, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Beijing, and Inner Mongolia, that crossbreeds The Third Man with The Maltese Falcon and comes up a whopping winner. Obsession is all when it comes to ancient textiles, be they from Peru or China: ``. . . they retain that dimension of all the lives that have passed through them. They were worn, they were used for making offerings, they were stepped on and washed in streams. It's there. You can feel it. And not just that. A textile is a crystallization of a culture. Of history.'' Thus it is when three men and a woman try to track down a very, very old Chinese map of the Invisible World that has been woven into a piece of tapestry. To add a delicious twist, one of foursome is already dead—or is he really another Harry Lime? The mutual friend who binds them all together is seemingly failed artist Clayton C. Smith, who upon killing himself in Hong Kong has invited them to his funeral, and even sent stateside buddy Andrew Mann plane tickets to Hong Kong and, as it turns out, $100,000. Also on hand for the reading of Clayton's will is Jeffrey Holt, a textiles expert who facilitates various manufacturing projects when not trying to smuggle 2,000-year-old pre-Columbian weavings out of Peru or similar artifacts out of China. The group is joined by Silvia Benedetti Jimenez, a young Argentinean, who has her own textiles agenda and is not to be trusted in a plot full of interlocking double-crosses. Clayton has left Andrew a series of clues he must track down and which at last lead to a monastery in Inner Mongolia where the map of the Invisible World will be found. Perhaps. Bodies never drop, only large chunks of Chinese philosophy and arias about great finds in the empire of cloth, as Cohen puts everything into this Far Eastern masterpiece.
Pub Date: Jan. 14, 1998
ISBN: 0-06-039227-4
Page Count: 368
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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