An intense but confusing and melodramatic espionage tale.
An American spy stumbles on a powerful organization’s secret terrorist plot in this fourth installment of a series.
John Wolfe is about to retire from the Agency, “one of the last master spies.” But on the day his farewell party is scheduled, he notices he’s being followed, and then learns a good friend and fellow agent, Jimmy Trang, is dead. Trang’s death is ruled a suicide with suspicious alacrity. In addition, John discovers his boss, T.S. Sprout—as evil as he is incompetent—is involved in a conspiracy to sell secrets to China. Sprout is in cahoots with a clandestine group that calls itself the Order of the Golden Squirrel, whose influence is so formidable it can “control, or at least strongly influence, every major country.” John encounters the beautiful and mysterious Mary Killigrew—it’s not clear for whom she works—who claims to have a list of the Order’s original members, and he’s inexorably drawn into investigating their treasonous plans. Branam (Nemesis Syndrome, 2016, etc.) continues his Wolfe Adventure Novel series, reprising a familiar cast. But unlike its predecessors, this installment gives the lead role not to FBI agent Thomas Wolfe, but his older brother, John. Thomas, “the most dangerous warrior on the planet,” is still in the mix to lend John a helping hand, as is the FBI agent’s wife, Terry. John is recruited to join the Order, but he’s dedicated to exposing its scheme to catastrophically harm the United States. The author generously packs the story with action—there’s no shortage of shootouts and fistfights—as well as romantic intrigue. But the plot feels like a self-parodying cartoon: superspies fighting supervillains with names like The Major and The Russian. The tale is also so complicated, the protagonist—the fictional conceit is that the narrator, John, is the writer of the book soon to be pulled from the shelves for disclosing state secrets—apologetically points it out: “Note: my editor tells me that I’m throwing too much technical detail at the readers and I will lose most of you.”
An intense but confusing and melodramatic espionage tale.Pub Date: Sept. 14, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4582-2198-8
Page Count: 384
Publisher: AbbottPress
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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