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REVENGE IS BEST SERVED HOT

Name: REVENGE IS BEST SERVED HOT
Author: Alan Eaton
ISBN: 978-1-5462-2154-8

by Alan Eaton ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 22, 2017

An entertaining and distinctive revenge tale.

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In this debut action-thriller, a man’s ferocious search for his wife’s killer incites someone’s retaliation, putting him in grave danger.

When John Avery Malaki catches his wife, Elizabeth, in bed with his best friend, Bill, he demands they both leave the house. But the bad news keeps coming: A few days later, cops inform John that Elizabeth is dead from an apparent suicide. He’s skeptical, and the evidence agrees, eventually designating the death as murder and John as the prime suspect. But a taunting voice on his answering machine takes credit for Elizabeth’s homicide and suggests John lay low. He doesn’t comply and soon finds himself framed for another murder. John then goes on the offensive, turning the tables on and demanding answers from people suddenly trying to kill him. Using combat skills (the origins of which are unclear), he tracks down others who can direct him to Elizabeth’s murderer, with occasional help from a secret ally. It seems an organization with the acronym SOTE wants John dead, believing he’s learned too much during his corpse-riddled hunt for a killer. With both sides determined to mete out rage-fueled vengeance, the body count is bound to rise exponentially before it’s all over. Eaton’s book is rife with explicit sex scenes and violence. The sex is provocative, especially with consenting participants, but the action can be downright sadistic and lingers on the gory parts. There’s mystery as well, including murky backstories for John and Elizabeth. Though one twist is revealed early (perspective from a revenge-minded individual in SOTE), there are additional surprises, from shocking deaths to the identity of the person aiding John. The enjoyable story is unfortunately diluted by excessive blunders: misspellings (“Chlorophorm”), grammatical and punctuation errors (“Some was from both our families”; “My brothers other vehicle”), and alternating past/present tense throughout. An editor’s eye would be valuable, as beyond those mistakes lies writing that’s comical (Elizabeth’s suicide raises a “shit load of red flags”) and razor-sharp (“My anger quickly subsided, and shame walked in”).

An entertaining and distinctive revenge tale.

Pub Date: Dec. 22, 2017

ISBN: 978-1-5462-2154-8

Page Count: 144

Publisher: AuthorHouse

Review Posted Online: Feb. 21, 2018

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

by Harper Lee ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 11, 1960

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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

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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LONESOME DOVE

A NOVEL (SIMON & SCHUSTER CLASSICS)

by Larry McMurtry ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 1985

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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.