by Jan Adkins ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 30, 1988
Cookie"" is Cookie Culler, 42, a Washington state ranch-owner who lives with scientist Nathan Levenstein (whom she calls ""Jewboy"") but also sleeps around--and reserves her innermost passion for dead pa Pete and beloved kid-brother Benjy, a roamer. So when Benjy shows up, on the lam from vengeful drug. smugglers, Cookie takes him in, hides him, and gets ready (with help from crusty family-retainers) to hold off any nasty invaders. Benjy, you see, hired to pilot a drug-plane, crash-landed--and refuses to tell his employers where the contraband shipment ended up stashed. It's not surprising, then, that the bad guys are after him: first comes a ""gunsel' (neutralized by cool Nathan); then there's quiet, forceful ""negotiator"" Coyne from Boston. But by the time Cookie agrees to lead Coyne to Benjy, the kid has disappeared (kidnapped?) and old ranch-hand Willard has been murdered--by an assassin who somehow got past Cookie's roadblock. Could it be that more than one gang is after Benjy? It sure could: the Mafia seems to be involved (a mob hit-man arrives--only to die in rattlesnake-pit agony). And so does the CIA. . .because Benjy was smuggling high-tech chips as well as drugs. Adkins, a prolific YA author, works hard at this grown-up fiction debut: lots of Western atmosphere and stagy dialogue, some of it laconically cute; graphic sex scenes, heavy on imitation-Hemingway prose and porno-exotica (""Give me your cock, dip it in chocolate""); and a sad secret beneath Cookie's casual, ribald exterior. But the plotting is thin and ragged (with a super-predictable final twist); Cookie remains more ""colorful"" than credible or engaging; and only a few of the outdoors-action sequences seem genuinely animated.
Pub Date: March 30, 1988
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: N/A
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1988
Categories: FICTION
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