Sci-fi and criminology deftly merge in this well-paced tale.
In this debut novel, a lawyer hopes that cutting-edge techniques in suspended animation can solve his problems with the Mafia.
Attorney Patrick Brádaigh lives in Westchester County, New York, and runs the Law Offices of Brady and Sons. For years, while enjoying a seemingly idyllic life with his wife, Colleen, and twin sons, Nick and Andy, Patrick unwittingly works for the Leggiano crime family. When he realizes his mistake, he begins keeping records on the Sicilian Mafia and its murderous operations. To remove the lawyer’s leverage, the mobsters burgle his estate. Trying to steal the records from a vault, a thief murders Colleen. Ten years later, her killer might go free, but Patrick still smolders at the chance for vengeance. The Brádaigh family goes on vacation to the Galápagos Islands, and it’s there that Patrick meets Dr. Kryten Vandermere, who is researching how iguanas remain underwater for extended periods—which will help NASA place humans in hibernation during deep space travel. He explains to her his idea for storing violent criminals in underground sleep chambers, where they won’t burden taxpayers but can be awakened if necessary. Little does the doctor know that Patrick has the Leggiano family marked for a more permanent kind of storage. Arden crafts a sci-fi thriller that heavily embraces family dynamics and red herrings. He teases readers, for example, when Andy says that he and Nick “did a lot of switching around” as children but “never got caught in the act.” Arden also schools audiences in the finances of maintaining a prison: “The approximately hundred and fifty thousand prisoners serving life sentences alone are costing law abiding citizens over four billion a year in hard-earned tax dollars.” That many of the female characters are sexpots—especially Andy’s friend Ronni Marcus, president and CEO of Marcus Manufacturing—gives the narrative a pulpy feel. Intense violence typical of the genre plays a minimal role except in the opening homicide sequence and the surprising finale, which act as brutal bookends to a story that succeeds on the strength of its ideas.
Sci-fi and criminology deftly merge in this well-paced tale.Pub Date: Feb. 28, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4834-3270-0
Page Count: 242
Publisher: Lulu
Review Posted Online: June 22, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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