Frenetic and clever: does for lonesome security guards what John Welter’s Night of the Avenging Blowfish (1994) did for the...
A high-strung sentry meets his match in this witty comedy about love, possession and the uncertainty of security.
Barring the overly elaborate but forgivable confluence of double-crosses at its gasping finale, Davies’s latest comic novel (Goodbye Lemon, 2006, etc.) succeeds admirably. Our loquacious narrator is Otto Starks, a highly specialized security agent known as a “pulse”—a human sentinel with otherworldly powers of perception honed by years of training and a plethora of pharmacological abuse incurred in the interests of toxin immunity. “To say that we are elite security guards doesn’t quite cover it,” Otto explains. “We are the reason why the Crown Jewels still belong to Great Britain and why warheads haven’t shown up in Iran.” Blessed with the love of struggling art-history professor Charlie Izzo, who thinks he’s a talent scout for the Mets, Starks is circling around a few more high-paying gigs before he plans to slip away with Charlie in tow on an expensive sloop. Putting a monkey wrench in his plans is a preternaturally gifted art thief dubbed the “Rat Burglar,” who revels not only in outmaneuvering the hypersensitive guard, but in leaving him alive each time to suffer the ridicule of his equally quirky comrades. Davies brilliantly imagines the elaborate details of guarding treasures that Otto thinks of merely as “MacGuffins,” from the bantering shorthand of his fraternity of muscle-bound custodians to the action-packed brawls between Starks and opponents armed with dart guns. As the plot intensifies toward a showdown among Otto, his elusive nemesis and a vicious underworld puppeteer named Azar over a stolen cache of misappropriated Iraqi art, Davies’s latest starts to resemble a comic book more than a crime novel. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
Frenetic and clever: does for lonesome security guards what John Welter’s Night of the Avenging Blowfish (1994) did for the U.S. Secret Service.Pub Date: Aug. 5, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-59448-314-1
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
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
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