A colorful tale of the long revenge of the Templars that often makes for compelling reading.
A historical novel that dramatizes the survival of the Order of the Knights Templar.
Lindley’s ambitious two-part debut concerns the titular knights, a group that was founded in the 12th century. It fought its way to legendary status during the Crusades, but was disbanded in disgrace in 1312 by papal decree. Lindley builds his novel on the events following the order’s destruction by King Philip of France, who issued arrest orders for the Templar leadership, including Grandmaster Jacques de Molay. These leaders are tortured by members of the Dominican Order into confessing the order’s alleged sacrilegious secrets; in the aftermath, knights flee to far outposts of Europe and plot their vengeance on the order that brought them down. The author grounds the sections set in the 14th century by occasionally shifting their focus to the year 2010 to detail the story of Jesuit brother Aloysius Daly, whose research into the Order reveals the destruction of Dominican churches and monasteries. Lindley follows the fleeing Templars first to Scotland for the Battle of Bannockburn in 1314, and then, in the second volume, to the Battle of Morgarten in Switzerland the next year. The author packs both parts of his book with a large cast of vividly drawn characters, and his action scenes are consistently engaging. A good deal of the novel’s rhetoric has a melodramatic tone that calls to mind his fellow Templary novelizer, Sir Walter Scott. For instance, take this passage from the torture of de Molay: “Pinioned in chains he too, like his brethren, discovered that unlike blows and wounds taken in the rush of battle, his naked flesh could not indefinitely hold out and withstand the intolerable pain, unremittingly and mercilessly applied.” However, readers should note that the book is also oddly formatted, with no indents to be found.
A colorful tale of the long revenge of the Templars that often makes for compelling reading.Pub Date: Jan. 15, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-9572944-2-4
Page Count: 396
Publisher: Nielsen Book
Review Posted Online: June 7, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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