A well-told mystery that involves Midwesterners forced to grapple with their town’s past.
This 10th installment of a series focuses on a sheriff with a new case rooted deep in a Michigan county’s history.
When the remote farmhouse that once belonged to his dead predecessor, Orville Hentzler, goes up in flames—its basement stockpile of guns and ammunition providing an explosive finale—Cedar County Sheriff Ray Elkins is tasked with discovering why. He knows that it’s arson, probably just some bored teenagers or a closet pyromaniac. Then Hentzler’s grave is vandalized. “When he was alive, people either loved him or they hated him,” remembers the cemetery’s groundskeeper. “He and his boys, you know, his deputies, they liked to crack heads....But he’s been gone awhile.” Could these incidents have anything to do with a hippie commune that Hentzler ran out of town back in the 1960s, the buildings of which were also subsequently and mysteriously burned down? Two duck hunters later report a cackling gunman shooting at their decoys with an automatic weapon. Soon after, a toddler is discovered abandoned in a snowy ditch, and the child’s mother is found dead, lying in her own house. These incidents—their variety and strangeness—demand some creative investigation from Ray and his partner, DS Sue Lawrence. All clues seem to suggest that these crimes are connected to the events of 40 years ago, but most of the people involved are long gone. What happens if a killer comes to town hoping to target Hentzler only to learn that he’s dead? Who will the killer go after then? Stander’s (Gales of November, 2016, etc.) prose is controlled and sparse, evoking both Ray’s deliberative personality and the midwinter Michigan landscape: “He lifted his head and watched as the truck quickly disappeared into the swirling snow. Then he looked around. The mangled remains of a snowmobile were mired in mud just below him in the ditch.” While certain aspects of the plot are a tad predictable, others are wonderfully unexpected, and the author’s practiced pacing should keep readers engaged throughout. Fans of the series should be pleased with this engrossing episode.
A well-told mystery that involves Midwesterners forced to grapple with their town’s past.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9975701-3-7
Page Count: 250
Publisher: Writers & Editors, LLC
Review Posted Online: Feb. 11, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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