Chaotic but often amusing first novel.
A nearly bankrupt Texas software mogul lets the CIA solve his tax troubles. The price for the service is access to his surprisingly versatile brain.
Until recently, the Internet was very good for Travis Anderson, allowing him and his acquisitive wife Shelby to move in the slickest suburban Dallas social circles while leaving two-year-old son Noah in the capable hands of a Russian nanny. But the good life is collapsing. While Travis has been hitting the sauce during a fallow period of invention, his business partner, Reed, has been stuffing the company’s cash flow up his nose and, quite possibly, boffing Shelby. Perhaps as a result of the booze, Travis keeps hallucinating all kinds of disasters, seeing dire futures for his acquaintances. His own future is as bleak as it gets. Much of the money that went for Reed’s cocaine should have gone for taxes. Now there’s a $5 million tax liability. Juggling his drinking binges with convoluted plots to expose Shelby and Reed’s perfidy, Travis is teetering at the edge of panic and ruin when chirpy IRS agent Debra McFadden enters his life and offers a deal. Greater Governmental Powers have noticed Travis’s exceptional proficiency at a fairly tricky computer game, and they would like to see whether his skills go beyond normal. They are so interested that they will make that tax problem go away if Travis proves useful. Posing as an alcohol-intervention facilitator, Agent McFadden spirits Travis off for detox and paranormal testing. Even as he’s enduring the considerable discomforts of withdrawal, Travis proves, to his own surprise, that his particular abnormal skill is to locate missing individuals, a talent well worth erasure of his great big debt—which is replaced by such new problems as Shelby’s dubious pregnancy, the recurring appearance of a blue god, an especially creepy vegan guide to the paranormal universe, a mysterious pair of Goth siblings and Travis’s peskily growing morality.
Chaotic but often amusing first novel.Pub Date: July 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-7147-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
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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