A feverishly readable psychological noir.
A fugitive embezzler in need of a fresh start gambles on assuming the identity of a presumed off-the-grid video game maven.
For lovers of crime fiction, there can be no more seductive catnip than a caper about a compromised antihero desperate to change his life for the better, the unhappily married femme fatale who is going to make that exceedingly difficult, a detective who is suspicious of both of them, and a rising body count. The book’s title alone evokes distinctive film noirs past like Johnny Allegro, Johnny Eager, and Johnny O’Clock. But this is no warmed-over pastiche. Tom Gantry is the kind of hard-luck case for whom “every place I walk into lately turns out to be the wrong place.” But then the thief meets John Manis, a reclusive former software god to whom Gantry bears an uncanny resemblance. One sailboat “accident” later and Gantry gets the opportunity for a second chance with Manis’ passport, wealth, and freedom. After a “slow westward drift through the casinos of New Orleans and Las Vegas,” Gantry buys a young entrepreneur’s business in a Napa Valley town and sets himself up as the Computer Kid, servicing the tech needs of the affluent residents. Two things muck up the works: Manis’ unceasing voice in his head (“What are you up to this time? Even I don’t get it”) and Marilyn Dupree, whose husband treats her cruelly. When Gantry meets the ravishing Dupree, “the fuse” is lit. Their passionate affair does not go unnoticed by Lou Eisenfall, a local cop, especially when the story takes some deadly turns. The novel’s central conceit does strain credulity: Certainly the re-emergence of a long-missing person of Manis’ stature would go viral and unmask the imposter. But all is forgiven when Diamond (Impala, 2016, etc.) nails an evocative, nihilistic, hard-boiled style that fans of Jim Thompson and the like will admire (“She saw something in me and I saw something in her, and whether or not it was something good, something was better than nothing”). A screen adaptation would be manna for character actors portraying Gantry’s intriguing customers (how about Blythe Danner as the Lemonade Lady?).
A feverishly readable psychological noir.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-9963507-7-8
Page Count: 290
Publisher: Stolen Time Press
Review Posted Online: June 25, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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