An involving romantic mystery that confirms the status of Llewellyn (The Lady of the Labyrinth, 1990, etc.) as a worthy contender for membership in the DuMaurier, Whitney, Stewart & Holt sorority of richly atmospheric suspense writers. Jo Treleven, a children's book illustrator, has come to England from her native Canada after the sailing death of her husband. With her baby son, she moves into Longbarrow, the Cotswolds cottage she inherited from her grandmother, intending to live there long enough to let ghosts rest back home. She also wants to track down a copy of her grandmother's one and only novel, Life Blood, most copies of which were destroyed in the bombings of WW II. Jo's cottage is somewhat spookily remote from the rest of the village, and 50 years earlier was the site of a murder. Adding to its eerie atmosphere is its location near a ``barrow,'' one of the ancient burial mounds that abound in the Cotswolds region around which many myths—most violent and disturbing—have gathered. To her surprise, Jo learns that the nearby Mallabys, a wealthy blue- blood publishing family, are her distant relatives. They do not seem very happy, however, with their newly discovered kinswoman. As Jo sets about searching for her grandmother's novel, she discovers something strange: all copies in libraries throughout Britain have been gutted by vandals. Someone does not want the contents of that book known. Through reviews, though, Jo learns that the characters in the missing novel resemble the Mallabys and her grandparents, and that betrayal and murder are presented very convincingly.... Refusing to be deterred by the Mallabys' cold warnings, Jo persists with her search, supported by someone who promises to become more than a friend, David Cornelius, the handsome American proprietor of a nearby farm. Despite the vague characterization of the romantic hero: a satisfying story with descriptions of the English countryside so vivid that you can almost smell the hay.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-684-19402-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1993
BOOK REVIEW
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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