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Overview
A brutal hijacker,A missing heiress,
And a luxury liner racing toward disaster...
In the quiet shallows of the Florida Keys, Thorn has made a home, tying fishing flies and trying to forget the violence of his past. Now Key Largo is his world. He fishes it, breathes it, makes love in it. Until a phone call from Miami changes everything plunging Thorn into the deep waters of madness and revenge...
In Miami, Thorn's best friend, Sugarman, is fighting for his life. While working security for a luxury liner plagued by theft, Sugarman was attacked by a man with a knife in one hand and 400,000 volts of electricity in the other. And when the M.S. Eclipse sets sail for the Caribbean, both Thorn and Sugarman are swept into a voyage of terror...where a madman hijacks the Eclipse, killing off crew members one by one...where the cruise line owner's missing daughter reappears, igniting the killer's passions--and Thorn's battered heart...where hundreds of lives hang in the balance, as only Thorn stands between a madman's rage and the ultimate carnage at sea...
In the quiet shallows of the Florida Keys, Thorn has made a home, tying fishing flies and trying to forget the violence of his past. Now Key Largo is his world. He fishes it, breathes it, makes love in it. Until a phone call from Miami changes everything, plunging Thorn into the deep waters of madness and revenge. Online promo. HC: Delacorte.
Synopsis
A brutal hijacker,
A missing heiress,
And a luxury liner racing toward disaster...
In the quiet shallows of the Florida Keys, Thorn has made a home, tying fishing flies and trying to forget the violence of his past. Now Key Largo is his world. He fishes it, breathes it, makes love in it. Until a phone call from Miami changes everything plunging Thorn into the deep waters of madness and revenge...
In Miami, Thorn's best friend, Sugarman, is fighting for his life. While working security for a luxury liner plagued by theft, Sugarman was attacked by a man with a knife in one hand and 400,000 volts of electricity in the other. And when the M.S. Eclipse sets sail for the Caribbean, both Thorn and Sugarman are swept into a voyage of terror...where a madman hijacks the Eclipse, killing off crew members one by one...where the cruise line owner's missing daughter reappears, igniting the killer's passions—and Thorn's battered heart...where hundreds of lives hang in the balance, as only Thorn stands between a madman's rage and the ultimate carnage at sea...
Publishers Weekly
A poet as well as a thriller writer, Hall (Gone Wild, etc.) brings an ear for language and an eye for the evocative detail, for the surge of meaning within sound and surface, to his latestwhich features his customary hero, the moody, middle-aged Thorn. Reuniting with Thorn here is his old friend Sugarman (last seen in Mean High Tide). Bizarre family dysfunction and impending ecological disaster prove familiar but still effective Hall motifs as Sugar signs on as head of security for a billion-dollar Miami-based cruise ship line and Thorn encounters an unusually chilling adversary. Sugar's task is to catch a chimerical murderer whose victims all have some relationship to the company's gambling flagship, the M.S. Eclipse, from which the criminal has been stealing $50,000 per month. Danger promptly surfaces, as Sugar is nearly killed by the psychopathic Butler Jack, who has stun-gun electrodes attached to his fingertips and who plans to hold the Eclipse and its passengers hostage for a king's ransom. Jack also has designs on Monica Sampson, the long-missing daughter of the cruise line's owner, but Thorn, who winds up aboard the ship along with Sugar, casts eyes toward this young beauty as well. Murder, techno-wizardry and plenty of sexual tension ignite into spectacular action as Jack sets the ship on a collision course toward an oil-laden supertanker off Miami's South Beach. The title is right on; this thriller will slice readers' sleep into slivers. (July)
Editorials
Publishers Weekly -
A poet as well as a thriller writer, Hall (Gone Wild, etc.) brings an ear for language and an eye for the evocative detail, for the surge of meaning within sound and surface, to his latestwhich features his customary hero, the moody, middle-aged Thorn. Reuniting with Thorn here is his old friend Sugarman (last seen in Mean High Tide). Bizarre family dysfunction and impending ecological disaster prove familiar but still effective Hall motifs as Sugar signs on as head of security for a billion-dollar Miami-based cruise ship line and Thorn encounters an unusually chilling adversary. Sugar's task is to catch a chimerical murderer whose victims all have some relationship to the company's gambling flagship, the M.S. Eclipse, from which the criminal has been stealing $50,000 per month. Danger promptly surfaces, as Sugar is nearly killed by the psychopathic Butler Jack, who has stun-gun electrodes attached to his fingertips and who plans to hold the Eclipse and its passengers hostage for a king's ransom. Jack also has designs on Monica Sampson, the long-missing daughter of the cruise line's owner, but Thorn, who winds up aboard the ship along with Sugar, casts eyes toward this young beauty as well. Murder, techno-wizardry and plenty of sexual tension ignite into spectacular action as Jack sets the ship on a collision course toward an oil-laden supertanker off Miami's South Beach. The title is right on; this thriller will slice readers' sleep into slivers. (July)Library Journal
Hall's enigmatic hero, Thorn, was last seen parrying poachers in the best-selling Gone Wild (LJ 2/15/95). Now, he finds himself on a cruise ship with a cunning terrorist who plans on blowing the boat out of the wateralong with a good chunk of Florida coastline.Bill Ott
Why does Florida bring out the twisted, surreal side of some of our finest crime writers? Perhaps it's a product of the state's schizophrenia: a sanitized, climate-controlled, theme-park paradise, on the one hand, and an art-deco jungle, on the other hand. In "Native Tongue" (1991), Carl Hiaasen imagined a kind of Armageddon set in a theme park, and now James W. Hall has turned a cruise ship into a floating nightmare. When Thorn, Hall's beach-bum hero perpetually in flight from the vacuousness of the American Dream, finds himself onboard a luxury cruise ship called the "Eclipse", you know the world is somehow off kilter. Intending to help out his pal Sugarman, head of the ship's security force, Thorn soon finds himself up against a techno-psycho intent on steering the "Eclipse" into the path of an oil tanker. With enough gadgetry to please Clancy fans, the gut-level narrative drive of a disaster novel, and the creepiest bad guy since Hannibal Lecter, Hall's latest has "breakout novel" written all over it. Fortunately, the more subtle pleasures of the Thorn series have not been completely obscured by the high-concept plot: there's some intriguingly detailed, Ross McDonaldlike rummaging through the psychological skeletons in a few familial closets; there's plenty of amusing interplay between the reclusive Thorn, who's never seen "Love Boat", and the talk-show-fanatic Sugarman; and, of course, there's a bizarre strain of black humor that's just right for a cruise from Hell. Thorn devotees may be reluctant to share their introverted hero with hordes of techno-thriller fans, but we'd best accept the inevitable: Hall's ship has come in.Kirkus Reviews
A fiendishly clever saboteur goes up against the uninspired defenders of the Fiesta Cruise Lines in the seventh of Hall's increasingly overblown action fantasies.Butler Jack has a passion for etymology, an integral stun gun installed on his fingers, a consuming hatred of Fiesta mogul Morton Sampson, and a plan to bring Sampson to his knees via a demand for a $58 million ransom he wants to donate to charity. To feed his hundreds of foster kids the world over, Butler plans to override the autopilots of the Fiesta cruise ship Eclipse and Sampson's behemoth, pathetically vulnerable oil tanker Juggernaut. To carry out this James Bond plot, he needs the unwitting help of the hopeless love of his youth, Sampson's missing daughter Monica. Monica, who ran away from Daddy and his dirty millions three years ago to settle down as buzz-cut Florida maid Irma Slater, readily rises to Butler's bait even as Hall's hero Thorn, who comes across more and more like Travis McGee guest-lecturing in Philosophy 101, and his sidekick Sugarman are coming on board Eclipse to foil Butler. But wait! How can either grizzled Sugarman or disillusioned Monica stop Butler when they're actually his own brother and sister? These twisted relationships ought to be the heart of the book, but they fizzle, because Hall (Gone Wild, 1995, etc.), who pumps up his characters to near-mythic status when he first introduces them, tends to neglect them thereafter, and they shrivel like demigods with a slow leak. So you're left with smiling, venal Sampson determined to keep the lid on Butler's murderous sabotage to protect the p.r. for the cruise, a showcase for his TV star wife Lola, Butler's mom; Butler snaking through the ship zapping everybody who gets too close; and Thorn and Sugar spouting manly wisdom like ninjas on Oprah.
Butler's a villain worthy of the grotesques in Dick Tracy, but the rest of the cast, including the hero, don't seem any more interested in the familiar plot than you're likely to be.