A powerhouse first volume in a supernatural-thriller series.
In this first volume in an epic urban fantasy series, an American federal agent has to deal with hell itself.
The protagonist of Walsh’s ambitious debut novel is a depressed, down-on-his-luck Diplomatic Security Service agent named Jubal Stone who’s been “effectively benched” by his boss, who thinks little of him. Stone was once a special investigator for the Office of Asset Recovery (“a deliberately obscure name for what sometimes turns out to be very nasty work”), but now he’s bitterly resigned to life in Norvell Township, Michigan, where he seems very much out of the loop. As a result, he’s cultivated a kind of big-picture cynicism: “Earth itself was no more than a rock with a bubble of air surrounding it,” he thinks at one point, “a tenuous condition that supposedly existed at the whim of some unknowable and unreachable God.” God suddenly seems much more reachable when a supernatural meteor crashes to Earth bearing a fallen Angel—a mystical being who quickly becomes the object of Stone’s new job for the agency. He’s partnered again with his former mentor, Thaddeus Coleman, and tasked with safely delivering the Angel to none other than Satan himself. The pairing of Jubal and Thaddeus is one of the strongest aspects of the book, as neither is a typical hero: They were chosen for the job, one character says, because the agency had nobody else available (“They’re both capable, but neither has been on top of their game for a while now”). What follows is an extremely winning variation on the formulaic model of Dan Brown’s 2003 bestseller The Da Vinci Code that offers a compelling combination of interagency thriller and supernatural fantasy. As various agents either help Stone or hunt him, Walsh handles the action scenes in a smooth and professional manner, and the dialogue is similarly efficient. The author also pays his readers the bedrock compliment of taking his absurd premise—a secret partnership between the U.S. federal government and hell—completely seriously, which works wonders.
A powerhouse first volume in a supernatural-thriller series.Pub Date: July 4, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-07-818665-0
Page Count: 563
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Nov. 29, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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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