An often engaging inspirational tale.
Retired journalist and radio broadcaster Jackson offers a debut mystery series-starter set in the music business, starring a middle-aged woman who rises to fame as a manager in Nashville’s Music Row.
Life isn’t treating Sarah Ann Boswell well lately. After her 26-year marriage to a high-powered attorney ends, she loses her job as vice president of community outreach for a charitable foundation, and things look bleak for her. In a fateful moment, she tries to end it all by taking an overdose of sleeping pills. Lucky for Sarah Ann, she’s rushed to the hospital before reaching the point of no return. With her ever faithful prayer group and her two adult children supporting her, Sarah Ann manages to face her situation, and she begins to recover. Jill Edgerton, the founder of a Nashville music-management firm, happens to be recuperating in the next bed. She offers Sarah Ann her friendship and a job—two things that Sarah Ann can’t pass up. Shortly after hitching her wagon to Jill’s, she meets musician Jared Parson, who “has the looks of a young Vince Gill, hips like Elvis, and a voice to challenge Blake Shelton.” The women immediately sign him as a client and later produce his CD, which hits the top of the charts. But something isn’t quite right about the new country star. And when someone turns up dead, Sarah Ann knows something is very, very wrong. Jackson’s writing wraps the reader in Southern charm, channeling Southern Living and offering recipes reminiscent of those in Paula Deen’s Southern Cooking Bible. When Sarah Ann isn’t meeting with her prayer group—which is apparently designed more for venting than praying—she’s attending the Grand Ole Opry or eating barbecued ribs. But although Jackson’s story is engaging throughout, its main plotline is delayed; although a minor mystery is alluded to in Chapter 8, the real one doesn’t get going until Chapter 26. Characters spend the remaining 11 chapters figuring out whodunit and encountering some overly helpful coincidences (including one involving a very clear fingerprint) and unoriginal motives (money and sex). But although the mystery isn’t challenging, it remains entertaining to the end.
An often engaging inspirational tale.Pub Date: May 2, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-948679-05-3
Page Count: 296
Publisher: WordCrafts Press
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
