A disenchanted, depressed psychologist finds himself caring for a rebellious teenage girl and helping police investigate a racist group in Percy’s debut thriller.
Psychologist Ed Northrup is “burned out” and unhappy in Monastery Valley, Montana, and still feels guilt over a young patient’s death from 27 years ago. His adulterous ex-wife, Mara, wants Ed’s professional opinion on her 14-year-old daughter, Grace, who’s twice attempted suicide. When Ed repeatedly declines over the phone, Mara defiantly shows up in person with her daughter in tow. Soon, Ed is dealing directly with Grace, an opinionated, stubborn teen who’s terrified of abandonment. At the same time, he works with cops on a case that indirectly involves another of his patients, Maggie; her husband, Vic, who’s suspected of abusing her, may be linked to a hate group that’s posting flyers opposing an African-American gubernatorial candidate. Percy highlights the story’s thriller components, such as the unsettling nature of the hate group, the Church of Jesus Christ of the American Promise, which offers its potential members assistance with tax problems before ultimately preaching racist sentiments. But the true focus, and the stronger subplot, is the tremulous relationship between Ed and Grace. It’s tough to sympathize with the foul-mouthed Grace, despite her predicament; she’s rude to nearly everyone, including a waitress who tells her she can’t order a burger before the lunch service begins. But whether readers find Grace an object of pity or annoyance, she’ll definitely ignite an emotional response. (The plotline involving Vic and the church is resolved well before the end, and the book closes, quite appropriately, with Ed and Grace.) Percy superbly relates much of the story with visuals: the recurrent image of Grace with her hood up and face in her phone; a belligerent church assistant’s Stetson, which inspires a nickname; and Ed imagining his depression as a snarling black dog. The sole female deputy, Andi Pelton, is a laudable character as she adjusts to her new job, but it’s somewhat predictable that she’s Ed’s romantic interest.
A light, breezy thriller, but its tale of a troubled man acting as a father to an equally troubled girl has exceptional dramatic impact.
Pub Date: June 3, 2014
ISBN: 978-1499009606
Page Count: 322
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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