The author has a number of tricks up her sleeve, making this tale of complicated women facing the unthinkable all the more...
A woman deals with mental illness and a shady new friend in this thriller.
Nina Taylor had money, success, and a happy family. Or at least she thought she did. When she suffers a mental breakdown, her family and career are put through the ringer. Her husband, Rodney, bans her from their home and takes thousands of dollars from her earnings as a software engineer. The parents at school shun her, labeling her a threat to the safety of their kids. Worst of all, her new medications make her slow, lethargic, and unable to work, allowing her to dwell often on the suicide of her older brother. One of the few bright spots in her life is a new friend, Deja, a mom at her kids’ school who is similarly ostracized for being a young single parent. Unbeknown to the protagonist, her friend has a dark past that threatens Nina’s family and safety. A runaway who got involved with a violent pimp, Deja managed to escape with her young son, establishing a cushy career as a small-time wedding planner. But she had to steal money from her ex, Kevin, in order to live a better life and he’s come back to collect. Harris’ (Blaming the Wind, 2016) thriller gets off to a slow but intriguing start as she offers weighty clues that foreshadow turns the book takes later. The pair’s friendship is tested when Nina walks in on Kevin getting violent with Deja and a moment of self-defense changes everything. Nina and Deja try desperately to raise enough money to get themselves out of their jam with Kevin. But around the same time, a mysterious black sedan seems to be tailing Nina, hellbent on terrorizing or killing her. The author delivers twist after twist in this pulpy story. Harris expertly navigates the line between Nina’s dire new reality and the vestiges of her mental illness, allowing readers to revel in tense uncertainty—a dynamic that extends all the way to questions of trust involving Deja and the duo’s deadly secret.
The author has a number of tricks up her sleeve, making this tale of complicated women facing the unthinkable all the more compelling.Pub Date: Dec. 29, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-948051-01-9
Page Count: 314
Publisher: Red Adept Publishing
Review Posted Online: Jan. 18, 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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