A banal chiller from Reiss (The Last Spy, 1993, etc.), this set at an American research base in Antarctica, in which a lone scientist battles the elements, colleagues, and superiors to solve the deeper mystery of his sister's death. Against administrative orders, gifted seismologist Jack Amirault (engaged in classified sounding work for the US Navy) and best friend Brian Phillips venture out to save sexy environmentalist Robyn Cassidy, who's marooned on Purgatory Road, a perilous mountain pass she's traversing to dramatize the dangers that development poses to the polar continent's ecology. The rescue mission succeeds, albeit at the cost of Brian's life—and Jack's status as a reliable team player. One year later, Evylyn Amirault, also working at the base, is found dead, floating in the frigid waters bordering the remote US station. While Jack believes his sister's been murdered, the official verdict is that she was the victim of an unfortunate accident. And fellow scientists—unwilling to jeopardize their government grants on the eve of a treaty that could open the resource-rich land to commercial exploitation, and wary of the grieving Jack's mental stability—decline to help. Jack nonetheless persists in his unwelcome inquiries and unearths evidence convincing him that there's a more sinister conspiracy. Circumstance obliges him to join forces with Robyn (who has her own agenda), and the two light out through the treacherous wilderness to confirm Jack's suspicions. Before they can come in from the cold to expose the schemes of the Western world's military/industrial complex, however, they must survive a fearsome blizzard, great sex on the glacier, and a lethal shootout in a craggy redoubt that houses mummified seals. Despite intentions good enough to pave an alternate route to hell, a preachy tract largely unredeemed by entertainment value.
Pub Date: Feb. 12, 1996
ISBN: 0-684-81119-7
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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