A complex political thriller for adventurous readers—and well worth the effort.
Following the reunification of Germany, the KGB recruits an operative to retrieve stolen bearer bonds crucial to Russia’s Canadian presence in this debut novel.
Kubiak’s tale combines international intrigue, the Mafia, the rise of Vladimir Putin, and existential musings on the meaning of life. After a young Romani tells Thomas Miller, “Death is all around you,” the German national receives his KGB assignment with a warning that echoes those words: “Expect trouble.” Miller, a hit man, secret agent, and deeply troubled soul, meticulously covers his tracks, ultimately arriving at a remote cabin in the Canadian woods fully armed. The plot twists and turns: Does his mission involve a war between rival mob factions? Is there another party involved? One of the Mafia groups approaches Miller, claiming their interests coincide. But no one can be trusted. Miller’s own people murder his girlfriend back in Germany, ostensibly to give him more incentive but also adding another layer of mystery: Who knew about the hit? Though the agent is described as having no soul, he goes to church at one point and later to a shrine. In both instances he engages rather prophetic priests in extensive and searching philosophical discourses. Kubiak’s unusually constructed book bounces around in time and point of view. At times, it is intimately first person, delving deep into Miller’s psyche; at other moments, it holds readers at arm’s length (“The big Benz started moving as the man reached into the glove compartment, taking out a big Beretta automatic”). The style reinforces the already deep mystery, leaving readers unsure of exactly what is going on or what Miller or any of the other characters will do next. The ending holds even more surprises as minor players turn out to be vastly more important than first perceived. The author has put together a well-written, thought-provoking mystery with political and philosophical ramifications that bear on events in today’s headlines.
A complex political thriller for adventurous readers—and well worth the effort.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5255-1858-4
Page Count: 270
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2018
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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