The team who write under the pseudonym of Cynthia Victor (Only You, 1994, etc.) now join the army of romance writers coupling love with serial murder. Commercial artist Lainey Wolfe, based in Manhattan, covets the life of best friend Farrell Cole. While Lainey toils away drawing cutesy characters like ``Matilda and Mommy'' and ``Patsy Pony,'' Farrell lives with her prosperous lawyer husband and their two swell kids in a picture-perfect home in Connecticut. What more could a girl ask for, thinks Lainey, than glowing fireplaces, a closetful of cashmere dresses, and the aroma of boeuf bourguignon cooking in the kitchen? But, in truth, Farrell is bored with suburban life and longs to recover her adventurous youth. With that in mind, she tries an afternoon as a call girl at a local hotel—a departure from the straight and narrow that leads to disaster: The Coles are found dead in their bed, apparent victims of carbon-monoxide poisoning, and Lainey, through a prearranged agreement, becomes guardian of their children. Though never one for commitments, she moves to Connecticut and begins the difficult switch from single careerwoman to single mom, with two grieving children to care for. She's not helped much by Farrell's sexy brother Penn, a successful TV producer who drinks too much and who's staying in the guesthouse. Penn and Lainey find their fights punctuated both by sexual tension and growing affection. But in romance, no one can live happily ever after while there's a killer loose on the home front. Though the reader knows from the start that the murderer is an overweight neighbor who bakes great cakes, Lainey and her lover are forced to follow an uninventive trail to piece it all out. Much more engrossing than their last outing; still, some attractive characters and believable relationships are done in by an amateur mystery filled with fortunate coincidences and tired clichÇs.
Pub Date: March 25, 1996
ISBN: 0-525-94033-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1996
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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