A tense, engrossing espionage tale.
1n 1992, a gay man is blackmailed by the CIA into becoming a spy in this debut thriller.
Trey Carter is a 22-year-old former gymnast, a graduate of an evangelical Christian college, and deeply closeted about his sexuality. When a handsome stranger flirts with him and approaches him, naked, in a deserted rooftop pool in Washington, D.C., Trey thinks he’s about to have a sexual encounter. Instead, several black-clad men appear and place a sack over his head. He soon finds himself in an interrogation room, and he believes that he’s under arrest. Instead, he’s presented with an offer that’s nothing short of surreal: “There’s a program that we are considering for you. We’ve never allowed in someone without military training...but your background is intriguing and possibly of service to us.” It turns out that the CIA is recruiting closeted civilians to serve as operatives on missions that require a man seducing another man; they call this program the Demaris Protocol. Trey can either join the team and submit himself for training or be outed by the agency to all of his friends and family. Seeing little choice, Trey acquiesces. His trainer is Rick Morgan, the lone survivor of the original Demaris Protocol of 1981, in which the recruits were all gay military personnel facing dishonorable discharges. Rick harbors misgivings about the program, but the best help that he can give Trey is to make sure he survives the ordeal. Randall writes in a quick, lean prose that highlights the tension in every scene. The pacing is swift, even as the book seems to cover nearly every hour of Trey’s training, employing swift jumps between various characters’ perspectives. The high stakes and the sexual chemistry between Trey and Rick combine to create an engaging, if sometimes-melodramatic, reading experience. Randall claims in an introduction that the story is based on events that actually happened to him and that the concept behind the Demaris Protocol was once an actual policy of the CIA; however, the story would be just as compelling as a complete fantasy.
A tense, engrossing espionage tale.Pub Date: June 20, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4808-4639-5
Page Count: 372
Publisher: Archway Publishing
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
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