August 27, 2012
Camelot-worshippers will best appreciate this clumsy sequel to 2011âs Paris to Die For from Kenneth (the writing team of Ken Salikoff and Maxine Schnall). In 1951, Allen Dulles, deputy director of the CIA, encourages Jackie Bouvier, still a trainee spy (while keeping her cover job as a photographer/writer for the Washington Times-Herald), to get to know Jack Kennedy in order to make the young Congressman âa friend of the CIA.â But the primary plot line revolves around Cuba and the CIAâs desire to know the intentions of the young Fidel Castro. The book teems with such real-life notables as Ernest Hemingway, Frank Sinatra, and Grace Kelley, who provide period color but otherwise play no meaningful roles. While thereâs enough action to fill a miniseriesâkidnappings, escapes, explosionsânot a single scene rings true. Leaden prose doesnât help. Agent: Melissa Chinchillo, Fletcher and Parry.
October 1, 2012
CIA agent Jacqueline Bouvier, on assignment in Cuba in 1952, meets Fidel Castro (advising him to grow a beard to look older) and is rescued by Ernest Hemingway in this sequel to Paris to Die For (2011). Sent to search for a nineteenth-century treasure and to ascertain Castro's political leanings, the intrepid young woman is trailed by three East German agents reminiscent of the Three Stooges, by Chicago Mob members, and by Cuban secret intelligence forces. (Her collateral assignment, temporarily put on hold, is to woo womanizing congressman Jack Kennedy to become a friend of the agency.) Once in Havana, Jackie skillfully escapes from a pit of hungry crocodiles and evades wretched Cuban prisons and death threats, often with the aid of handsome revolutionary lawyer Emiliano Martinez, an inevitable love interest. Other luminaries make cameo appearances, among them Frank Sinatra, to whom Jackie suggests the perfect role to boost his flagging movie career. There's plenty to enjoy in this light spy caper by wife-and-husband team Maxine Schnall and Ken Salikof, as long as the reader is willing to suspend credulity.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)