Another worthy entry in this love-and-fangs series.
In the third installment of their horror series, Hays and McFall (The Cowboy and the Vampire: Blood and Whiskey, 2014, etc.) return to LonePine, Wyoming, as human Tucker and vampire Lizzie discover that they have a whole new type of bloodsucker to worry about.
The world of vampires is dying out, as they’re unable to turn humans to replenish their ranks. But in LonePine, the nine vampire tribes have at last found a prophesied savior. Is it Lizzie, their new queen, who wields the power to save their kind, or is it her unborn child? Time will tell; for now, Tucker and Lizzie are just trying to enjoy a respite—and maybe even get married—now that a semblance of peace has been reached. But before they can say “I do,” a well-trained mercenary group kidnaps Lizzie. There’s no ransom and no demands; the man that hired them, fat-cat businessman Auscor Kingman, has other plans. With the help of Dr. Louisa Burkett, a scientist who will do anything to have one last shot at vindicating her theories, he intends to use Lizzie’s blood to synthesize a cure for human aging—and make a fortune selling it. As research begins, Burkett uncovers the existence of the Meta, the otherworldly plane where all vampires’ consciousnesses go during daylight hours—and where humans’ souls go when they die. While this discovery opens up new business opportunities, it also lets Elita, Lizzie’s friend and bodyguard, and Rurik, a Russian rival for the queen’s affections, know that Lizzie is still alive. Now it’s a race for the mixed-species rescuers (human, vampire and Tucker’s dog, Rex) to save Lizzie and her unborn child. This series is intended for audiences who like blood and bullets along with their romance, and the prose here is sharp and to the point, much like the majority of the characters. Although the plot this time around is fairly straightforward, its events result in dire consequences for the star-crossed lovers. With pulse-pounding action, ongoing intrigue over the fate of vampire-kind, and the tumultuous struggles of Tucker and Lizzie’s love story, Hays and McFall once again deliver a thoroughly entertaining novel for readers to sink their teeth into.
Another worthy entry in this love-and-fangs series.Pub Date: May 5, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-9838200-4-8
Page Count: 346
Publisher: Pumpjack Press
Review Posted Online: May 4, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2014
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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