A disconcerting central character is adeptly balanced by a strong young girl likely to win readers’ hearts.
Huskins’ (Khan in Rasputin’s Shadow, 2009) latest thriller follows two kidnapped young sisters who find help from an unlikely source—a psychopathic serial killer.
A late-night excursion for groceries takes a dark turn for Kaley and Shannon, young siblings taken by a Russian group that deals in human trafficking. It seems that the only witness to the abduction, Spencer Pelletier, isn’t sticking around; a seasoned criminal and killer, he escaped from the Leavenworth federal penitentiary two years ago and would prefer avoiding the cops. While authorities search for the girls and Spencer, Kaley uses an ability her grandmother called “the charm” to develop a telepathic connection to Spencer. A disturbing man, Spencer behaves in twisted ways disclosed rather bluntly—particulars of his murders involve a rather uncomfortable amount of biting. He may make some readers squeamish, and he’s certainly hard to like when he’s gathering funds and false identification to continue hiding from police, all while two girls are being held captive. But Huskins smartly turns Spencer into a necessary evil: Kaley’s “charm” sets him on a path often reserved for heroes, and the kidnappers, whose vile deeds exclusively include children, are much worse. The true protagonist, however, and the story’s finest character, is 12-year-old Kaley. She’s a motherlike figure for her younger sister, Shannon—their real mother is a meth addict—and even to Bonetta, another abducted girl. Her initial encounter with Spencer at a local store is astonishing—they unnerve one another, her sensing that he’s a murderer, him believing she’s recognized him—and brilliantly establishes a bizarre alliance that’s maintained throughout the story. The novel sustains a high level of intensity, with the girls rarely being left alone and their captors moving them while keeping them under surveillance. It also teases Spencer’s past transgressions—namely an incident in Baton Rouge and what exactly happened to a schoolmate in the fifth grade. The inevitable confrontation between Spencer and the human traffickers may not be to everyone’s tastes, but its audacious over-the-top approach is certainly imaginative and not likely to be forgotten.
A disconcerting central character is adeptly balanced by a strong young girl likely to win readers’ hearts.Pub Date: April 13, 2013
ISBN: 978-1482064735
Page Count: -
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: July 22, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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