Talons - Hardcover

Mancini, Anthony

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1556112343 ISBN 13: 9781556112348

Publisher: Dutton Adult, 1991

Synopsis

A ferocious golden eagle with a taste for human blood rides the thermals of the canyons of Manhattan, while policeman David Torino, ornithologist Antonia Meadows, and falconer Raven Lokka try to stop the terror

About this title

From Kirkus Reviews:

A hint of Hitchcock, a pinch of Ibsen, a touch of Peter Benchley, and Bruce the Shark now glides on thermals over Manhattan, menacing the millennial World's Fair. No, it's not really a shark, it's a giant berkute (eagle) with a 12-foot wingspan, the genetic mutation of a pair of eagles who mated in the radiation-filled winds over Chernobyl. Raven Lokka, an American diplomatic attach‚ with a lust for falconry, is given the baby eagle in the Ala-Tau mountains of Kirghizia and takes it home to Minnesota, where he attempts to train it. When Brunhild, the eagle, flies off with Lokka's baby son, and then his wife commits suicide in despair, Lokka vows revenge. Four years later, in 1996, when the eagle has matured, Lokka hears of a giant raptor chewing up folks in Manhattan. And we hear of New York's mayor maddened by the possibility that the New York's World's Fair will not come off because of that enemy of the people, Brunhild. Enter Antonia Meadows, Curator of Birds at the Central Park Zoo, a divorc‚e with one child, who lives high, high up in a penthouse with a beautiful terrace open to the heavens. When the eagle kills her zoo's star panda, Antonia teams up with police lieutenant David Torino, who was the first to determine that the city's rash of strange disembowelings came from a giant bird. What plot there is serves as casing for overgenerous amounts of filler about raptors--but, then, wasn't Moby Dick like that about whales? Does it take storytelling genius for a vengeful Brunhild to snatch Antonia's child from her terrace and carry him still alive to her big nest atop the Woolworth Building? Is there a reader alive who won't remember a giant ape falling, falling...or Ahab lashed to Moby Dick, or Bruce gobbling up crusty old Robert Shaw--and not expect to see Raven Lokka and Brunhild locked in a death embrace above the gargoyles of Woolworth? No disappointments! All stops pulled out on schedule. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From Publishers Weekly:

Mancini's ( Menage ) story about a man-eating eagle is reminiscent of William Bayer's Peregrine. But while the latter novel was a spellbinder, events here are telegraphed so bluntly there's little suspense. Raven Lokka, an American diplomatic attache in the Soviet Republic of Kirghiz, learns falconry from a nomad who presents him with an eagle he caught near Chernobyl. After Lokka smuggles the fledgling back to the States, the bird grows into a mutant giant as a result of its exposure to radiation. When the bird, called Brunhild, attacks Lokka's baby son, he frees her, but she subsequently returns and kills the boy. Later, when a giant panda is bizarrely mutilated at the Central Park Zoo, curator Antonia Meadows collaborates with Lt. David Torino, NYPD; the situation acquires urgency as a series of human victims die under the raptor's talons. Thinking she has located Brunhild, Antonia mistakenly shoots another eagle with a tranquilizing gun and keeps it in a cage in her home for study. Ensuing events are anticlimactic and rendered without the saving grace of irony. Mancini's habit of introducing victims just before they die gives the novel a monotonous predictability. Literary Guild and Doubleday Book Clubs selections.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Dutton Adult
• Publication date: 1991
• ISBN 10: 1556112343
• ISBN 13: 9781556112348
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 230