An aviation page-turner that delivers a diverse and well-developed cast of characters, nonstop action, and unrelenting...
Set in the late 1980s, a debut novel chronicles the unforeseen consequences of an ex-convict’s attempt to hijack a 747 flight from San Francisco to New York City.
Capt. Don Webber, a veteran aviator who has been married for 26 years, is looking forward to piloting a 400-plus–passenger Boeing 747 to JFK airport. It’s not so much the long flight that excites him as it is his scheduled rendezvous with his most recent lover, a sexually adventurous Pan Am flight attendant. But his plans of infidelity are thwarted by an ex-con named Guillermo Villas Guerrero, who has become entangled in an ill-conceived plot to hijack a plane to Cuba. Guerrero has mixed feelings about the scheme (“One moment, he felt the hijacking was going to be a snap, a piece of cake. The next moment he was terrified with recurring and rampant visions of failure. The result of his dreamed failure was always the same. He would fail. He would be caught. He would go back to prison”). Once in the air, he begins unraveling emotionally and eventually takes a cabin attendant hostage with a graphite handgun that he smuggled aboard, forcing his way into the cockpit. The situation devolves quickly from there. This thriller is comparable to the air disaster movies of the ’70s (Airport, Airport 1975, etc.). Stott adeptly creates three-dimensional and believable (albeit a bit stereotypical) characters whose various struggles and motivations help power the story forward. Director of security operations at San Francisco airport Robert Burns and senior dispatcher Frankfurt Lazlo Fielding come alive on the page, giving readers a glimpse into the pressure-packed and bureaucratic nightmare that working with the Federal Aviation Administration can be. Another of the novel’s strengths is paradoxically a weakness as well. The author is highly knowledgeable about aviation, and that expertise initially brings an undeniable authenticity to the story. But there are numerous sequences in which he goes into too much detail (such as explaining a phugoid oscillation curve), and these collectively detract from the tale’s narrative flow and negatively affect the momentum. But these issues have little impact on the overall reading experience.
An aviation page-turner that delivers a diverse and well-developed cast of characters, nonstop action, and unrelenting tension; buckle up and prepare for a wild ride.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-692-29053-8
Page Count: 408
Publisher: Black Thunderbird Press
Review Posted Online: April 14, 2017
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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