Heady, madcap fun in a sequel that surpasses the original.
In the second installment of Roberts’ (Ed Savage and the Savage Murders Trilogy, 2016) thriller series, the Savage family confronts kidnappers and salacious rumors.
After the events of the last novel, wealthy intelligence operative and TV star Ed Savage and his family members are recovering from the loss of loved ones. One of those lost is Cara Vanderran Savage, Ed’s sister-in-law; her sister, Zolie Vanderran, seeks closure at the Vreeland Hills Sanatorium, where she hopes to speak to one of the inmates responsible for Cara’s death. Unfortunately, Dr. Stanley Sinardi works there, and he has a grudge against Ed for stealing the spotlight on Stan’s reality TV series, Phantom Finders, and later pitting his own show against Stan’s. Later, when Ed and other Savages go looking for Zolie, they face not only Stan, but another deadly doctor who took her captive. Ed’s troubles only escalate after someone abducts two of his nieces; an interviewer blindsides him with an allegation of “sick sex games”; and an old case of his resurfaces following the discovery of warheads from a missing submarine. Meanwhile, Ed’s wife, Marlo, who’s preparing to be on the reality show Tycoon Wives, gets distressing news that could destroy the couple’s marriage, and a subsea earthquake triggers a tsunami that puts multiple Savage family members in peril. Clearly, Roberts packs his frenzied novel with numerous subplots and characters. His ability to manage them all is most impressive, and he makes the relationships between the many players abundantly clear. (That said, it is recommended that readers first tackle Volume 1 in order to understand relevant references.) Likewise, the author bounces around various plotlines with ease; for instance, he effectively establishes the creepiness of the hospital before Ed and company stroll its corridors. The story dabbles in multiple genres, including action and horror, and the family drama could have filled a book on its own. The end result is a dizzying ride, and readers will doubtlessly anticipate the Savages’ third go-round.
Heady, madcap fun in a sequel that surpasses the original.Pub Date: Oct. 29, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-692-90388-9
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Savage Roberts Publishing
Review Posted Online: Jan. 29, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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