A curvy thriller with a few unexpected turns.
American tourists on a Veracruz biking trip find themselves in the middle of a savage war between the Mexican militia and local contraband-running rebels in the Silberbergs’ debut novel.
Dr. Brad Sommers believes that a bicycle tour through Mexican jungles is just the thing to take his mind off a pending lawsuit. He’s facing civil action because he couldn’t save a senator’s injured daughter. Joining him are cancer survivor and divorcée Celia Dane; Kevin Black, who’s entangled in his own legal battle over his family business; and hapless, boozing Robbie Roberts. Guide Ramon Garcia and his younger sister, Elena, lead them on a pleasant excursion that takes a nasty detour when they stumble upon the bloody aftermath of a gunfight, including plenty of leftover drugs, guns, and gold coins. The group opts to take some of the latter, and soon it’s clear that their greed could be their downfall. The authors open the story by quickly establishing the protagonists and their back stories. Although the novel wisely introduces its villains early on—including black marketeer Enrique Salerno, who doesn’t mind killing (and is really good at it)—they take their time developing Brad and the rest. It’s a slow but particularly effective method, easing readers into the tour right along with the characters. It also makes it more convincing when avarice precipitates the need for a kidnapping—and even more shocking when someone later dies. The Silberbergs’ well-developed characters remain credible even in severe circumstances; Brad, for example, could potentially use his medical knowledge to render an armed man unconscious, but it’s a different story when he’s actually facing the man. The story races through invigorating twists, including double crosses among both the good and bad guys, an explosion or two, and the use of a bike as a weapon (of sorts). However, the climax, though exciting, doesn’t quite measure up to the buildup of the brisk final act. The coda thoroughly wraps up the story, including all the subplots of the people still alive.
A curvy thriller with a few unexpected turns.Pub Date: Oct. 29, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-78228-396-6
Page Count: -
Publisher: Pneuma Springs Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 23, 2015
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
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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