A fast-paced and deeply enjoyable debut novel in need of (and deserving of) a publisher.
A beautiful Angel of Death kills Nazis for the Israeli government.
Gabriella, the complex, alluring central character of McNulty's debut novel, is one of the Nokmim, a secret force of hunters and killers enlisted by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) in the years after World War II to find and execute fugitive Nazis. The story opens with her tempting a drunken former oberführer to a Paris apartment, where she tortures then kills him. Gabriella is comfortable in the role of vengeance personified (“We can't just walk away from the past,” she says. “Those butchers must answer for their crimes”). But there’s a problem: As McNulty's gripping, atmospheric story makes plain, the Israeli government may no longer be quite so comfortable with the old arrangement. The young nation is planning a televised trial of the recently captured Adolf Eichmann, and as one of Gabriella's superiors tells her, “the days of killing mid-level functionaries in dark alleys are coming to an end.” As conflicted as this makes her feel, it's nothing compared to the conflict aroused by her new assignment, to hunt down SS Major Friedrich Guderian in the backcountry of Nicaragua and administer her special brand of justice. Through hardship and illness, she eventually finds a man who could be Guderian—except that he's a beloved village missionary and personally attractive to Gabriella. The two grow closer, and the narrative expands with extensive and often harrowing flashbacks to the years of Nazi death camps and mass murder. McNulty unfolds the complex story with care and a pitch-perfect ear for dialogue (and something of an over-fondness for blocks of exposition, an easily corrected fault). Readers will fall in love with Gabriella.
A fast-paced and deeply enjoyable debut novel in need of (and deserving of) a publisher.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2011
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Kurti Publishing
Review Posted Online: Jan. 9, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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