On the plus side, Woods’s trademark characters, unsurprising and banal, fit perfectly into their roles as political...
Woods, most often seen recently in the company of lawyer/sleuth/adventurer Stone Barrington (Worst Fears Realized, 1999, etc.), pushes the scion of the Lee family (Grass Roots, 1990 paperback) into a run for the presidency.
It happens like this: Vice President Joseph Adams, the presumptive Democratic nominee, secretly tells Georgia Senator William Henry Lee IV that he’s been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and plans to withdraw from the race in Will’s favor, if only the senator will run. Will agrees—but before he can announce, a stroke sends the sitting president into a coma and Joe Adams into the White House as an acting president determined not to endorse anybody till after the conventions. But even before you realize that Woods’s juicy premise was nothing but an excuse to get his principled hero into a national race despite his scruples, the subplots have started to kick in. A former mole put away by Will’s wife Kate, CIA deputy director, offers his secret support in return for a forthcoming presidential pardon. A conservative South Carolina Republican begins a smear campaign designed to insure that Sen. George Kiel takes the nomination away from Will so that he can lose the election to the GOP. A long-buried scandal from Will’s past erupts when he refuses the request of his onetime lover, movie star Charlene Joiner, to file a Death Row appeal on behalf of a murderous rapist he unsuccessfully defended, and the rapist accuses him of incompetence. Even if Will gets past all the obstacles Woods has strewn in his path, there’s still the survivalist who tried to kill him years ago, and is happy to try again. The result is the most unnuanced, even clueless, political thriller you'll read all year.
On the plus side, Woods’s trademark characters, unsurprising and banal, fit perfectly into their roles as political candidates and advisors. Maybe there’s some insight here after all.Pub Date: June 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-06-019187-2
Page Count: 368
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2000
Bell’s first is so over the top—in a genre where hyperbole, bombast, and implausibility are the norm—as to seem a spoof. The...
Not-so-secret agent Alexander Hawke makes James Bond look like a slovenly, dull-witted clock-puncher as he saves the world from Cuban coup plotters, post-Soviet arms dealers, Middle Eastern germ warfare, nuclear destruction, and bad manners.
Lord Hawke, descendant of the pirate Blackhawke, is impossibly wealthy, handsome, clever, cunning, brave. Concealed weapon-sensing parrot, Sniper, upon his shoulder, he’s the distillate of generations of Hawke perfection. But, sadly, Hawke’s life is not all light and glory. A childhood trauma casts a darkness others don’t see in the glare of his radiance. He witnessed the murder of his impossibly beautiful, fabulously wealthy, and inconceivably brave parents aboard the family yacht while on a treasure hunt in the Bahamas. He lacks conscious memory of that day but, damn the luck, it comes back to him when he returns to the Caribbean while trying to thwart a plot by two cartoonish Russian arms peddlers to put the ultimate nuclear stealth sub into the hands of Fidel Castro. Despite the deep soul wound, Hawke can see beauty in others while saving the world. Yes, there is a woman: “In a world besieged by dirty little wars and full of evil, dangerous people, he was doing his duty. Work he felt was vitally important. At the same time, he’d managed to re-build his family fortune and fund causes and charities he believed in. And, at last he’d met a beautiful woman he couldn’t get off his mind, Dr. Victoria Sweet.”
Bell’s first is so over the top—in a genre where hyperbole, bombast, and implausibility are the norm—as to seem a spoof. The most compelling reason to push to the end of this jerkin-ripper is to see whether Hawke will swing from a chandelier during swordplay.Pub Date: June 3, 2003
ISBN: 0-7434-6669-1
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2003
Despite Gardner’s considerable research into the foster-care system, her plot is a tired one populated with cardboard...
The execution-style murders of a family and the disappearance of their eldest daughter once again bring together a seasoned homicide detective and a kidnap victim–turned-vigilante to find the killer.
In the Boston suburb of Brighton, it’s Detective D.D. Warren’s (Find Her, 2016, etc.) least favorite kind of crime: the slaughter of a family. Juanita Baez, her boyfriend, Charlie Boyd, her 13-year-old daughter, Lola, and her 9-year-old son, Manny, are all dead, shot to death in their home. Conspicuously absent are 16-year-old Roxanna Baez and the family’s two elderly dogs. Warren and her team weigh the possibility that Roxy was abducted or the more chilling one: that she murdered her family. Turns out Juanita wasn’t always a perfect mother; the state removed her children five years earlier due to her drinking, placing the girls in the almost Dickensian Mother Del’s foster home, where all manner of abuse went on under the radar. In a rare instance of family reunification, Juanita regained custody, but the girls’ time in foster care changed them. In an awkwardly patched-in subplot, another Gardner regular, kidnap survivor Flora Dane, who now runs a support/empowerment group of sorts for women who’ve lived through similar trauma, realizes Roxy approached her group before disappearing, making Flora determined to find her before the police do. She and D.D. enter an uneasy, and entirely preposterous, partnership, each exploring her own leads in a case that, while tragic, becomes more predictable with each supposed wrinkle and stereotypical villain.
Despite Gardner’s considerable research into the foster-care system, her plot is a tired one populated with cardboard characters and twists any savvy reader will see coming a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5247-4205-8
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Nov. 13, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2017
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