A lawyer-turned-shamus is hired to hunt up a former American serviceman's Vietnamese child—with a $50 million bequest as the stakes. A few months before he died of a stroke, telecommunications king Matthew Marshall recounted in a codicil to his will how he secretly fathered a child in a 1971 tour of Vietnam; though he never saw the child and doesn't even know its gender or its mother's present name or whereabouts, he wants it located and given half his estate. Adam Bruno, the investigator Marshall's punctilious attorneys hire to look for the child, starts with nothing more than an address book full of names and numbers of people who all agree that Marshall—hard-driving, gregarious Marshall—never talked about Vietnam. With the help of some cryptically annotated photos and a few timely anonymous letters in Vietnamese, Bruno tracks down Marshall's mates from Vietnam, but most of them—from a crazy upstate hermit who ambushes visitors to a haunted Florida abortionist to a cagey CIA op whose years in a think tank haven't made him any more forthcoming— don't want to talk either, and the ones that do can give him only the slimmest hints about Cricket, the elusive woman in Marshall's life. Crisscrossing the country by airplane and computer hookup, Bruno slowly, slowly closes in on the ancient history that everybody's so unwilling to face. Meanwhile, back in New York, someone—presumably some member of Marshall's legitimate family, all of them reluctant to see their shares of the estate cut in half—is taking strong measures (theft, espionage, homicide) to insure that Cricket's story will never come out. Occasional novelist Topor (Coda, 1984, etc.) has envisioned all this as synthetically and suspensefully as in one of his screenplays (The Accused, etc.). Breathless stuff right down to the wire: a rare civil case that comes on as strong as all those fictional actions across the hall in the criminal courtroom.
Pub Date: April 6, 1995
ISBN: 0-7868-6153-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1995
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
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