A tale of an amateur detective who’s bright and riveting even when he makes mistakes.
A teenager with aspirations to be a police officer looks into the case of a missing woman in the latest, prequel installment of Greyson’s (Pure of Heart, 2015, etc.) thriller series.
Foster brothers Jack Stratton and Chandler Carter each have three months before they enlist in the Army, and they intend to follow their two years of service with stints in college and the Police Academy. Jack wants to enjoy his last summer, but financial analyst Stacy Shaw’s unexplained disappearance changes his plan. He doesn’t know her, but he does know “J-Dog,” aka Jay Martin, whom cops arrested after he admitted to finding the woman’s wallet. Although Jack and Jay, foster kids who grew up together, aren’t currently on friendly terms, their former foster mother, Aunt Haddie, enlists Jack’s help. He compiles a wide range of suspects, from a crazy, homeless man known as Vlad to Stacy’s lascivious boss, Leland Chambers. Fortunately, Chandler willingly sits with Jack during his stakeouts. Decidedly less fortunate is Detective Lyle Vargas, who believes that Jack is impeding a police investigation and threatens Jack’s future career by casually accusing him of crimes such as planting evidence. Jack will have to steer clear of the detective to solve the case, unless he’s prepared to wind up in prison with J-Dog. Despite the protagonist’s age, Greyson’s story isn’t in the young-adult genre. Jack is actually at the tail end of his teens, and this book chronologically takes place before a series featuring Jack as an adult detective. Greyson adeptly establishes Jack’s personal life while also reminding readers of the mystery; Jack’s date with a delightful young woman named Kelly, for example, begins with a news report about Stacy and later leads to the couple witnessing Jay’s arrest. The sound mystery brims with red herrings, and quite a few of Jack’s hunches miss the mark even though he bases his guesses on evidence. The book also shows Jack pragmatically investigating by perusing Facebook pages and doing old-fashioned footwork. The narrative explores darker territory—including drugs, prostitution, and possible murder—but doesn’t fully immerse itself in it, and there’s hardly any vulgar language aside from perhaps too many utterances of the word “crap.”
A tale of an amateur detective who’s bright and riveting even when he makes mistakes.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-68399-002-4
Page Count: -
Publisher: Greyson Media Associates
Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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