The disillusioned former Mossad officer who blew the whistle on his old organization (By Way of Deception, 1990—not reviewed) now gives us his first novel, about...a Mossad officer who goes it alone, disillusioned with the organization. When Shaby Talaat, a Syrian National Security middleman whom Mossad op Natan Stone's been running as Foul Play, lucks into a hot secret—that an agent called the Fox has been gathering and training members for a new Syrian-backed Palestinian terrorist unit whose mandate is to assassinate moderate Palestinians who are ready for peace talks with Israel—Natan moves swiftly to infiltrate the group and spike its plans. His masters at Mossad, however, have other ideas, since they have no objections to the assassinations. (In fact, Mossad, Natan learns in a particularly entertaining aside, had been perfectly willing to assassinate Jimmy Carter when the Camp David negotiations seemed to be giving away too much to the Egyptians.) So Natan goes off the books to place somebody (who, ironically, turns out to be Nadin, a notorious terrorist's daughter, and another free-lancer like himself) inside the Fox's lair—not realizing that Col. Karl Reinhart, the former Stasi terrorist head who's now working with the Syrians, is on to him and, eager to protect the mole he's had lodged in Mossad for years, plans to kill two birds with one Stone by fingering Natan as the mole. As his old comrades chase him all over Beirut, Paris, and The Hague, Natan has to figure out a way to safeguard Nadin without blowing her cover—at the same time identifying and exposing the real mole once and for all. Anybody who doubts he can do it all, and do it his way, hasn't spent much time among Israelis. Authentic, offbeat tradecraft and clever touches throughout make this worthwhile despite its unmemorable characters— including the hero—and chop-socky prose.
Pub Date: Sept. 7, 1993
ISBN: 0-312-10016-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1993
Steinbeck's peculiarly intense simplicity of technique is admirably displayed in this vignette — a simple, tragic tale of Mexican little people, a story retold by the pearl divers of a fishing hamlet until it has the quality of folk legend. A young couple content with the humble living allowed them by the syndicate which controls the sale of the mediocre pearls ordinarily found, find their happiness shattered when their baby boy is stung by a scorpion. They dare brave the terrors of a foreign doctor, only to be turned away when all they can offer in payment is spurned. Then comes the miracle. Kino find a great pearl. The future looks bright again. The baby is responding to the treatment his mother had given. But with the pearl, evil enters the hearts of men:- ambition beyond his station emboldens Kino to turn down the price offered by the dealers- he determines to go to the capital for a better market; the doctor, hearing of the pearl, plants the seed of doubt and superstition, endangering the child's life, so that he may get his rake-off; the neighbors and the strangers turn against Kino, burn his hut, ransack his premises, attack him in the dark — and when he kills, in defense, trail him to the mountain hiding place- and kill the child. Then- and then only- does he concede defeat. In sorrow and humility, he returns with his Juana to the ways of his people; the pearl is thrown into the sea.... A parable, this, with no attempt to add to its simple pattern.
Pub Date: Nov. 24, 1947
ISBN: 0140187383
Page Count: 132
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1947
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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