Fans of war stories and Christian fiction should be rooting for the hard-nosed hero to find grace.
In this novel about the war on terror, bravery and faith go hand in hand.
This American military drama begins in 2003 in a village square near the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. Dressed as an Afghan woman, Special Operations officer Jake Drecker slips into the crowd and shoots a Taliban leader in the head. Meanwhile, an American Christian missionary has been kidnapped in Karachi, Pakistan. And on that very same day, Special Ops forces in the mountains north of Jalalabad in Afghanistan are about to be overtaken by Chechens, but they are saved by a mysterious army. Weaving these incidents together, the author creates a story of heart-pounding action and edge-of-the-seat suspense. Jake is a professional killing machine who struggles with his past and sarcastically refers to himself as a “nice Jewish kid from Hawaii.” His commander, Michael “Pancho” Sanchez, leads the Prodigal Avenger Special Operations task force. Soon to be promoted to colonel, Pancho has a high degree of respect for Jake and the other soldiers in the field. Pancho’s last wish before becoming a paper-pusher is granted when he and Jake must take out the terrorist Abbas Bin Azzam. But a defect in the plan occurs when the missionary hostage is placed in their crosshairs. Can they obliterate the bad guy while saving the captive? Or is Jake going on a crazy suicide mission? Though the real star of this novel is Jesus (Jake fights an inner battle with disbelief), the Christian theme is not heavy-handed in the story, and any reader should appreciate the predicaments of the characters involved. Moynihan’s (No Greater Love, 2015) polished prose is fast-paced, and his gritty descriptions are sometimes starkly poetic. For example, during one exchange of fire, “the mini-guns opened up and began chewing up the hilltop. Shimmering brass shell casings fell in twisting clumps from the guns to the earth below.” The author also offers some singular points of view. In a scene that’s both compassionate and provocative, readers go inside the mind of a failed suicide bomber to find out how he came to such a low point in his life.
Fans of war stories and Christian fiction should be rooting for the hard-nosed hero to find grace.Pub Date: Nov. 27, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-948888-79-0
Page Count: 298
Publisher: Elk Lake Publishing, Inc.
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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