A well-constructed, action-packed novel.
One man’s quest for power centers on an ancient artifact in this international thriller.
Nina Monte is an academic expert on religious antiquities and has spent much of her adult life thinking only about the past. But that changes when she’s recruited by an Italian government agency to evaluate a relic found on a 15th-century galley. This prospect excites Nina, as she feels that “something else awaited her there; something, she sensed, that had been there a long, long time. Something of value that was far beyond measurable.” After she arrives at Lake Garda, the relic’s location, she meets lonely hotelier Alessandro Pini, who soon becomes her partner in her adventure. She quickly discovers that the inquiry is actually a ruse by treasure hunter Lammert van der Venn, who’s discovered an ancient stone tablet and wants Nina to decipher its writings. Van der Venn thinks that the tablet’s mantras will grant him power: “I’ll be among those who walked into the Kingdom of Heaven, alive,” he says to Nina, who refuses to help him after finding out what kind of man he is—so he sets his sights on her Indian grandmother Sati who first told her about the tablet years before. Soon the race is on to find Sati, with Nina and Alessandro pitted against van der Ven and his henchmen. Chrusciel (Illusive Intrusion, 2014) uses detailed research to add necessary authenticity to scenes set in Germany, Italy, Austria, and India, such as in this description of Milan’s Piazza del Duomo: “In the middle of the square, to her right, she passed the monument of King Victor Emanuel II, who watched over the Gothic cathedral and other surrounding buildings.” His characters develop throughout the novel, as bookish Nina and mousy Alessandro do more than they ever thought they could do in order to help those they love. The story’s pacing is appropriately breakneck as the couple hurry around the globe and stay just ahead of van der Venn’s lurking shadow. In the end, the tablet’s mysterious powers remain nebulous, but just enough is revealed to suggest that no one should possess them.
A well-constructed, action-packed novel.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-9929574-3-8
Page Count: 370
Publisher: Agato House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
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
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