An inventive adventure tale marred by familiar plotlines.
A quartet of friends searches for treasure on a mysterious island in this novel.
Jack Simmons is a 29-year-old living an unfulfilling life in Manhattan, a low-level computer clerk who aspires to become a software developer. In the hopes of lifting his sagging spirits, he decides to visit his mother, who is still reeling from the sudden death of his father. She reveals that his father left him a letter and a key to a locked chest that turns out to be filled with antique artifacts and a map of a Caribbean island somewhere near Barbados. Jack’s father, an archaeologist, had become obsessed with finding the island, which allegedly harbors a centuries-old treasure but is contaminated by a curse. According to Jack’s mother, that fanatical commitment to locating the island, named Carta, consumed his life. Later, she suffers a heart attack, and her doctor says she will need to be cared for in an expensive nursing facility. Jack decides he can raise the money for her health care by finding the booty that eluded his father. He sets off for Barbados with his best friends—Arthur McIntosh, Michael Hagen, and Lucie Lapierre—and is able to ascertain that the strange island once belonged to Alexander De Carta, a doctor conducting experiments there, who inexplicably vanished. The island was then shuttered in response to puzzling “mishaps” that plagued it. Jack and his friends locate Carta and travel there to discover its riches. But they are furtively shadowed by Josh Connelly and James Perkins, two of Jack’s work colleagues intent on stealing his reward and humiliating him. Leger (Reflections of the Heart, 2010, etc.) conjures a complex tale that combines a rich, imaginative history of early 19th-century piracy with a rousing contemporary adventure on a dangerous Caribbean island. Nearly every element of drama is included: mystery, intrigue, the supernatural, violence, and even a love blossoming between Jack and the plucky Lucie. But the plot as a whole is a tapestry of timeworn formulas, and even for a fabulist story challenges credulity. In addition, the writing, especially the dialogue, is mechanical and spiritless. Early on, Jack tells his mother: “The atrocious news of your heart attack bewildered me, and I came as soon as possible.”
An inventive adventure tale marred by familiar plotlines.Pub Date: Jan. 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5462-2567-6
Page Count: 246
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: April 28, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The format of this taut and moving drama forcefully regulates the pacing; breathless, edge-of-the-seat courtroom scenes...
In a riveting novel from Myers (At Her Majesty’s Request, 1999, etc.), a teenager who dreams of being a filmmaker writes the story of his trial for felony murder in the form of a movie script, with journal entries after each day’s action.
Steve is accused of being an accomplice in the robbery and murder of a drug store owner. As he goes through his trial, returning each night to a prison where most nights he can hear other inmates being beaten and raped, he reviews the events leading to this point in his life. Although Steve is eventually acquitted, Myers leaves it up to readers to decide for themselves on his protagonist’s guilt or innocence.
The format of this taut and moving drama forcefully regulates the pacing; breathless, edge-of-the-seat courtroom scenes written entirely in dialogue alternate with thoughtful, introspective journal entries that offer a sense of Steve’s terror and confusion, and that deftly demonstrate Myers’s point: the road from innocence to trouble is comprised of small, almost invisible steps, each involving an experience in which a “positive moral decision” was not made. (Fiction. 12-14)Pub Date: May 31, 1999
ISBN: 0-06-028077-8
Page Count: 280
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1999
A delightfully captivating swatch of autobiography from the author of Kiss. Kiss, Switch Bitch and many others. Schoolboy Dahl wanted adventure. Classes bored him, there was work to be had in Africa, and war clouds loomed on the world's horizons. He finds himself with a trainee's job with Shell Oil of East Africa and winds up in what is now Tanzania. Then war comes in 1939 and Dahl's adventures truly begin. At the war's outbreak, Dahl volunteers for the RAF, signing on to be a fighter pilot. Wounded in the Libyan desert, he spends six months recuperating in a military hospital, then rejoins his unit in Greece, only to be driven back by the advancing Germans. On April 20, 1941, he goes head on against the Luftwaffe in the Battle of Athens. On-target bio installment with, one hopes, lots more of this engrossing life to come.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1986
ISBN: 0142413836
Page Count: 209
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Oct. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1986
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
