Notable mostly for the digs at a CIA agent remarkably similar to Valerie Plame.
Griffin returns to chronicle the international adventures of heroic presidential special agent Charley Castillo (The Hostage, 2006).
Too modest and too rich to be just another rampaging Ollie North, Major C.G. “Charley,” polyglot love child of a German newspaper heiress and an even richer Texas aviator, has been charged by his doting president with the formation of a special-operations group answering only to the White House. The president wants Charley to clear up the mess left behind when he and his ragtag band of straight-shooting marines, honest CIA operatives, brainy Asian F.B.I. agents and their admiring Argentine opposite numbers located and almost snatched the perfidious high-level U.N. bureaucrat who absconded to rural Uruguay with 16 million dollars rightfully belonging to an international ring of oil-for-food swindlers. The snatch of the bureaucrat had been foiled by a black-clad gang of seemingly unidentifiable “Ninjas” armed with untraceable weapons, one of whom took out the bureaucrat even as Charley was reaching for him. The Ninjas were all wiped out, but the oil-for-food thieves want their money back and they want equally to eliminate anyone with clues about their identity, especially elderly Hungarian man-about-town and ace reporter Eric Kocian, a favorite of Charley’s. Armed with the disputed 16 million bucks snatched from the late bureaucrat’s secret accounts, girded with a promotion to Lt. Colonel and staffed with the best office administrator on the planet, Charley rounds up his troops and swears them into the new unit and off they fly in Charley’s Gulfstream, back and forth from Argentina to Germany to Hungary to Texas to Argentina to Uruguay, accompanied on much of the trip by Kocian’s huge and adorable Flemish sheepdog, until they at last clear up most of the mysteries, leaving just enough unsolved for a sequel.
Notable mostly for the digs at a CIA agent remarkably similar to Valerie Plame.Pub Date: Jan. 2, 2007
ISBN: 0-399-15379-9
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2006
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
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
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