A little dark to be a comic caper, but with an original plot and Texas-true characterizations, it’s a top-notch mystery.
In his modern Texas whodunit, Blakely melds a Las Vegas Mafioso tale into the Austin music scene.
It’s 1975, and Creed Mason has come back to Texas just as alt-country is taking off. Creed’s a Vietnam vet with a Purple Heart; he’s bitter because his one-time singing partner, Dixie Houston, parlayed his talent into her own fame after he was drafted. Blakely’s Texas tale widens its trail to follow Austin-bound Rosabella Martini, who's running from her Vegas wiseguy uncle Paulo. Rosabella was adopted, and so there was no blood loyalty in play after she stumbled on her cousin Franco cleaning up a mob hit. Franco's trailed her to Texas and made her his next victim. Next enters Luster Burnett, a legendary but long-retired country musician with a "tone as smooth as an aged whiskey." Luster’s manager shot himself, leaving the singer with gambling markers—some held by Paulo Martini—an IRS lien and the need to get out on the road to sell some records. Creed meets Luster at a poker game and ends up as his band leader, which gives the author, a professional musician, a chance to display his chops writing about the bus-riding, beer-drinking, honky-tonk life of a work-a-day guitar player, right down to the barroom gigs where fights spread "like ripples from a rock tossed into the corner of a pool of nitroglycerin." Blakely’s grip on 1970s social transitions shines as well as he describes a land where folks were still trying to work out who's "colored" and who can be called "boy" as he brings in African-American FBI Special Agent Mel Doolittle, on Paulo's case in Vegas, to partner with Texas Ranger Hooley Johnson, who's investigating Rosabella's murder. Toss in fishing, floating poker games, a précis on songwriting and a fiddler with a propensity for puking, and Blakely brings it all together with a Las Vegas shootout and an unanticipated payoff.
A little dark to be a comic caper, but with an original plot and Texas-true characterizations, it’s a top-notch mystery.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-7653-2751-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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