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INVISIBLE WORLD

Name: INVISIBLE WORLD
Author: Stuart Archer Cohen
ISBN: 0-06-039227-4

by Stuart Archer Cohen ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 14, 1998

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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

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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SUMMER ISLAND

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2001

The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...

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Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.

Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.

The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.

Pub Date: March 1, 2001

ISBN: 0-609-60737-5

Page Count: 336

Publisher: Crown

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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LAST ORDERS

by Graham Swift ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 5, 1996

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Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.