Synopsis
An adventure featuring Evan Michael Tanner on a convert mission to stop Burma's drug trade and topple its corrupt government that matches him with an exiled Russian beauty
Reviews
[Block] not only takes one of his most entertaining protagonists out of deep freeze but also scrapes the ice crystals off the neglected subgenre of the espionage caper tale.
Never one to abandon a sound series hero indefinitely, Block (who recently resurrected burglar Bernie Rhodenbarr) has now also brought back international man of action Evan Tanner, after more than 25 years. As usual, Block has a good joke up his sleeve: Tanner, one of whose characteristics is his inability to sleep, had in fact been comatose?in a deep freeze, in fact?for all that time, and the scene where he wakes up, thinking Richard Nixon is still president, is as funny and sharp as a similar one in Woody Allen's Sleeper. After that, Tanner is off to a new exotic locale, activated as usual by his vaguely CIA manager: this time it's to Burma, where he's supposed to destabilize the government by assassinating a popular opposition figure. He doesn't do it, of course, but becomes involved instead with a beautiful woman who wants to flee the country and eventually, after participating in a guerrilla action, both manage to do so. It's never less than inventive and amusing, but Block is always most at home in Manhattan, and his overseas settings, deftly sketched as they are, lack the ultimate authenticity he finds there. Tanner, too, though endowed with the author's usual wry wit, is not as fully fleshed out as are Block's more recent creations; but this will do until another Scudder comes along.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Evan Tanner, the soldier of misfortune who's been out of commission since Me Tanner, You Jane (1970), returns, youthful and hale as ever, for a murky assignment in Burma. Tanner is chilled to the bone, and no wonder: Ever since a tenderhearted activist whose politics didn't square with Tanner's decided to get him out of the picture, he's spent the past 25 years cryogenically frozen. Defrosted, updated--in a series of welcome-to-the-90s vignettes that are the best thing in the book--and restored to his daughter-figure Minna, the Lithuanian royal claimant who's now grown to seem as old as he is, Tanner's ready for another posting at the hands of his old chief. Tanner's ostensible assignment this time is to destabilize the repressive regime in Myanmar (``Burma'' to the retro sensibilities of Tanner and the Chief) by assassinating Aung San Suu Kyi, the housebound Nobel laureate who's the world's most famous dissident, at the behest of billionaire businessman Rufus Crombie, who wants to install a new regime that can buy more American goods. But even before he's politely forbidden from entering Suu Kyi's street, Tanner knows he isn't going to kill her. Unfortunately, it's never entirely clear what he's going to do in Burma instead, other than drink cheap local liquor, get involved with a Eurasian refugee whose ancestors have picked the losing side in every political struggle in the past century, and find a dead man in his hotel bed. Inevitably, Tanner gets picked up by the police, and then at last he's got a mission: to get out of Dodge ahead of the hangman while giving full rein to his creator's matchless gifts as a raconteur. Block (Everybody Dies, 1998, etc.) writes about Burma with the insider's slant of somebody who's spent time there, and with the disenchantment of somebody who doesn't expect to be invited back. Tanner's fans, happy to see him back in action, won't mind if the action doesn't seem to go anywhere in particular. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Die-hard Block fans who have read every title in his Matthew Scudder and Bernie Rhodenbarr series will cheer the return of Evan Tanner, the globetrotting, adventurous insomniac who last appeared in Me Tanner, You Jane (1970). Having been in a cryogenic deep freeze in a New Jersey basement for the past 25 years, the newly thawed and well-preserved Tanner (he's 64 but looks 39) discovers that Richard Nixon is no longer president and that his foster daughter Minna, the 11-year-old claimant to the Lithuanian throne, is now a sexy young woman. He also receives another covert assignment, to destabilize the government of Myanmar by assassinating Aung San Suu Kyi, the Nobel prize-winning Burmese dissident. This being Block country, things go immediately awry; Tanner and Katya, a beautiful Russian exile he encounters in his hotel room, spend the rest of the book trying to escape Burma. Despite the paper-thin plot, readers will enjoy Block's trademark humor and comic characters.
-?Wilda Williams, "Library Journal"
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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