A San Francisco reporter might lose more than her job when her editor forces her to investigate the supposed suicides of two New York breeders of prizewinning dairy cattle.
In this debut novel, Cora Brooks is a veteran on the police beat for the San Francisco Standard. She is 45 and suffering the indignities of “an ungrateful son, a husband who’d found a younger woman, a body run amok,” not to mention an unsympathetic editor who seems bent on replacing her with an Eve Carrington–like rival reporter. Despite her protests, Brooks is dispatched to New York on the whim of her publisher to follow up on a New York Times story about two dead men, found in separate locations. One of them, Sean O’Brien, was the publisher’s friend. The other was Franklin Santerra, a dairyman who, over a four-month period, sold O’Brien three highly insured prize cows, each of which died within four weeks of the transaction. Over the course of a fraud investigation, O’Brien ingested strychnine, and Santerra, four days later, blew his head off with a shotgun. Brooks has her suspicions, not about the case, but concerning the editor’s motivation for sending her: “You think I’ll screw up so you can fire me. Save one layoff.” The seasoned reporter does not anticipate becoming part of the story as she uncovers links to her own haunted past and seeks closure to the mystery of the mother who abandoned her. The book alternates chapters Gone Girl–style, a device that works intermittently. At one point, Brooks is the focus of five consecutive chapters. Others are devoted to Abby, a woman at the turn of the century who becomes involved with an O’Brien ancestor; State Police Maj. Del Somer, who was once married to O’Brien’s widow; and Alice, Brooks’ elusive mother. Da Vigo has a strong sense of place and writes authentically about a profession under siege by corporate takeovers. And in Brooks, she has created a flawed but capable and empathetic character. “You’re a pisser, aren’t you?” Somer asks at one point. “Only in my better moments,” she replies.
Stop the presses! An appealing crime-fiction heroine is born.
Pub Date: April 28, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9745722-1-5
Page Count: 428
Publisher: Quill Driver Press
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
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
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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