A beautiful dose of carnal mayhem set in Purgatory.
This debut fantasy thriller finds an assassin taken out of the killing game only to be thrust into a surreal plot to dethrone a deity.
Former Glasgow street urchin Deborah has killed 38 people at the behest of a shadowy organization called The Orchard. Her handler, Eli, now guides her toward her latest target, a man residing within a sumptuous, unguarded mansion. She makes the assassination look like an accident, giving him a lethal injection between his toes. Moments later, someone shoots Deborah in the chest, killing her. She awakes in a Spartan room, situated in what appears to be an industrial slum full of “bedraggled beggars and throngs of sad-looking civilians.” When Deborah meets the Angels Zotiel and Zephon, they tell her she’s in Purgatory. They bring her to the Archangel Raziel, who informs her that “God is gone” and His Office has been corrupted. Deborah, an atheist, must nevertheless come to grips with her otherworldly predicament. She’s recruited by the Divine Revolution to kill the New God, who has usurped the throne and stripped the angels of power. Murdering the deity, however, means first assembling a proper support team from within the vastness of Purgatory, including a tactician (“I need someone who thinks differently than I do,” Deborah says. “Someone I can work with. Who can consider the long game, while I deal with the immediate”). James aims to scandalize in his raucous novel, boasting no shortage of horrendous flashbacks to teenage Deborah’s life in her aunt’s abusive home and then on the streets of Glasgow with her young lover Mark. Readers follow the path of someone who learns that “Hitman is a very apt word,” because the “same word we use for a kill, a junkie uses for a shot.” The narrative’s parade of shocking moments (like Deborah’s first kill, using a pen on her victim’s neck) should leave fans of garish violence and spectacular action in awe. Leaving his dramatic denouement for future installments, James spends quality time introducing the characters Deborah needs for the mission—like Lena, the nurse, and Whitman, the strategist—in segments that surround a charismatic protagonist with an equally likable cast. Near the end, a ghoulish chase sequence is the cherry on top of a richly disturbing story.
A beautiful dose of carnal mayhem set in Purgatory.Pub Date: Nov. 26, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5187-8716-4
Page Count: 490
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 27, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
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SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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