Virtue, vice, and things naughty and nice clutch and pair in Branon's latest bang-or-be-banged thriller, as Las Vegas becomes a stalking ground where gamblers, gunners, and their girls frolic before getting down to some lethal business. Branon (Let Us Prey, 1994) borrows heavily from the same fund of casino and rifle lore that worked for him before. Spunky Melody barely survives in Vegas as a blackjack dealer and minion in a football book joint. Arthur, a nice but nerveless hired gun, makes the most of covert-ops tricks learned in Vietnam, while longtime partner Montana swings the deals and sets up targets. Manly Mike is their next victim, scheduled to be terminated by the casinos for manipulating point spreads in football so that he rakes in millions on a single game. Mike comes into Melody's joint, they lock eyes, and chapters-long sex follows. Meanwhile, Melody's best friend, Karla, has connected with Montana, and plot lines converge in a weird double date, with Melody dragged in as Arthur's partner. Soon Arthur moves in with Melody, needing to lie low after losing control of his temper one night and killing two muggers with his bare hands, one of whom turned out to be a senator's son (who says truth is stranger than fiction?). Arthur teaches Melody to shoot because she wants to impress Mike, also a shooter, on their next date. But Melody comes to care for Arthur too; when the desert showdown begins, she finds herself with a rifle in her hands and chaos in her heart. Action-packed with all the sex and shooting—which is good, since the characters and situations can't bear much scrutiny—but the torrent of technical and torrid detail all but washes away Branon's thin, far-fetched plot. (Book-of-the-Month alternate selection; $75,000ad/promo)
Pub Date: May 10, 1995
ISBN: 0-06-017760-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
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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