A verbose continental adventure, but one with menace, intrigue, and a few pleasant surprises.
An American businessman tries to save his ex-lover from European criminals in Welles’ debut thriller.
Mike McKenzie had spent some time in Prague after grad school and remembers the time fondly. But he’s surprised to get a phone call one night and find out that his Czech ex-boyfriend, Evžen Srnck, is now in trouble and needs his help; he’s on the run from some gangsters and has fled to Paris. Mike, who’s filled with nostalgia and some degree of desire for Evžen, boards a plane and heads to France. Once there, Mike learns that his ex had been lured into a scheme in which a Czech mafia don gave him money upfront to buy a bar, but then demanded repayment quickly in large installments. An almost broke Evžen escaped from Prague, but the Czechs have sent thugs to Paris to hunt him down. Mike must protect him, and later himself, as they race around Paris in an increasingly dangerous cat-and-mouse game. As Mike falls headfirst into the drama and peril of his ex’s predicament, he and “rent boy” Christophe become lovers. When the mobsters eventually kidnap Evžen, Mike and Christophe team up with Lt. René Jacques of the Paris police to stage a rescue. Welles’ caper is certainly fast-paced and rarely takes a breath as the novel goes on. Through all the calamities, Mike notes that “he’d already seen and done things he wouldn’t have believed himself capable of just twenty-four hours before.” Indeed, the author fills the book with seedy bars, ancient hotels, stashed guns, shady deals, and escapes out windows. The story’s circuitous nature makes it seem somewhat convoluted, long-winded, and a bit repetitive at times. Still, it’s often hair-raising, and it even has time for a few moments of romantic longing.
A verbose continental adventure, but one with menace, intrigue, and a few pleasant surprises.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-5350-2200-2
Page Count: -
Publisher: Dog Ear Publisher
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
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
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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