As a crime novel, this work doesn’t consistently sustain the level of suspense needed for a page-turner, but its reflective...
A down-and-out debt collector abruptly finds himself at the center of a murder investigation.
Spanish lawyer Pablo Esteban’s life is falling apart, as the business he works for is near bankruptcy and his longtime girlfriend has recently left him for another man. Unexpectedly, he runs into his former best friend, Trendy, on the metro, and the two make plans to meet later to reminisce about their teenage years and fill each other in on the decade-plus since they've last seen each other. Later that night, Trendy is stabbed to death, and police investigator Antonio Roche believes that as one of the last people to see him alive, Pablo is the key to solving the murder. Set in 1998, the story begins slowly but becomes increasingly captivating as Pablo is reunited with his childhood friends at Trendy's funeral and later returns to the barrio of his youth. In between time spent assisting Roche with interviews, Pablo pursues meetings with other inhabitants of Madrid who owe his employer long-standing debts, some of whom also have startling connections to Pablo's old life. Jiménez Barca’s novel won the Silverio Cañada Prize in 2006 for best debut crime novel in Spanish, and his prose, translated by Rowdon, deftly conveys a world-weary tone, especially as Pablo reflects on his teenage years and on Nora, the girl he and Trendy both loved. Investigator Roche deftly interrogates Pablo's and Trendy’s former acquaintances, always keeping one eye on how the past is shaping the present, and the case takes on new urgency as Pablo's own life is threatened.
As a crime novel, this work doesn’t consistently sustain the level of suspense needed for a page-turner, but its reflective moments offer eloquence, even in the well-trodden territory of teenage love triangles and coming-of-age tales.Pub Date: Nov. 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-8494349621
Page Count: 326
Publisher: Hispabooks
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2015
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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