by Tom Clancy ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 1, 1989
Even as he is heavily engaged in arms negotiations and Star War technicalities, John Ryan, hero of The Hunt for Red October and Patriot Games, must come up with a plan to get the CIA's most important informer out of the hands of the KGB. CIA strategic wizard John Ryan (Sir John to his British chums) is as smart as anybody in Langley, but even Ryan has a little trouble following the ins and outs of the physics and engineering it takes to get a first-class Strategic Defense Initiative laser and mirror project up and running. Fortunately, the US government has a team of top-notch boffins on the job, and our lasers are starting to score hits. But the Soviets haven't been napping, and they're the first to zap a satellite on the wing, using, apparently, smoke and mirrors. It would be a strategic disaster were not details of the Soviet project arriving regularly, sent by Colonel Misha (Codename: Cardinal) Filitov, three-time Hero of the Soviet Union and aide to the Defense Minister. Misha, while loyal to the motherland, has no use for the current management. He's been getting away with spying for 30 years, but his luck has run out, and the KGB are on to him. There is, at the same time, a leak in the American ranks, and our Star Wars secrets are anything but. And, while all this technozapping and spying are going on, there's a band of Afghan rebels ready to take on the Russian army at a super-secret base near the border. Oh, and there's a coup hatching in the Politburo that might put the Politburo back in the Stone Age. Ryan's not the only one with his hands full. Less reliant on technoblather than previous Clancy works, and awash in subplots, most of them entertaining. Plenty of action; no mushy stuff.
Pub Date: July 1, 1989
ISBN: 0425116840
Page Count: 513
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1988
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by Caitlin Mullen ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 3, 2020
A lyrical, incisive, and haunting debut.
In Atlantic City, the bodies of several women wait to be discovered and a young psychic begins having visions of terrible violence.
They are known only as Janes 1 through 6, the women who have been strangled and left in the marsh behind the seedy Sunset Motel. They wait for someone to miss them, to find them. That someone might be Clara, a teenage dropout who works the Atlantic City strip as a psychic and occasionally has visions. She can tell there's something dangerous at work, but she has other problems. To pay the rent, she begins selling her company, and then her body, to older men. One day she meets Lily, another young woman who'd escaped the depressing decay of Atlantic City for New York only to be betrayed by a man. She’s come back to AC because there’s nowhere else to go, and she spends her time working a dead-end job and drinking herself into oblivion. Together, Clara and Lily may be able to figure out the truth—but they will each lose something along the way. Mullen’s style is subtle, flowing; she switches the narrative voice with each chapter, giving us Clara and Lily but also each of the victims. At the heart of the novel lies the bitter observation that “Women get humiliated every day, in small stupid ways and in huge, disastrous ones.” Mullen writes about all the moments that women compromise themselves in the face of male desire and male power and how they learn to use sex as commerce because “men are always promised this, no matter who they are.” The other major character in the novel is Atlantic City itself: fading; falling to ruin; promising an old sort of glamour that no longer exists; swindling sad, lonely people out of their money. This backdrop is unexpected and well rendered.
A lyrical, incisive, and haunting debut.Pub Date: March 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-2748-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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by Lisa Jewell ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 24, 2018
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.
Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.
Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s (I Found You, 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5464-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
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